Last week, our employees travelled to Tenerife to install our innovative solar thermal heating plant. 

We are building a system for our customer Aqualia, a global leader in water management, that uses the abundant solar energy to provide heat, in the form of hot water, that will be used to power a thermal desalination plant.  

The solar plant consists of a CPC collector system with 60 vacuum tube collectors and a thermal energy storage (TES). The non pressurised thermocline storage tank has a capacity of 20 m³ (20,000 litres) and can store water at up to 95°C.   

The heat that the system will provide will be utilised in a membrane distillation process. In contrast to the reverse osmosis process that is in widespread use and which desalinates seawater using high pressure and electrical energy, membrane distillation uses heat to separate fresh water from sea water.   

Our solar thermal desalination plant on Tenerife is a significant step towards sustainable water extraction and resource utilisation!