A number of years ago, the City of Medicine Hat started an energy conservation program to slow down the degradation of its gas reserves. One outcome of this program is a 1 MW Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) demonstration system which began operation in November 2014. The project is the first of its kind in Canada, and the first of its kind in the world in a northern climate.
Medicine Hat is one of the sunniest places in Canada, with an average 2544 sunshine hours and 330 days of sunshine per year. Medicine Hat also enjoys a suitably high solar resource of direct normal irradiance (DNI) of 5.1 kilowatt-hrs/m2/day making it an appropriate location for a CST.
CST integrates solar thermal energy with one of the four combined cycle generation units at the Medicine Hat power plant. Thermal energy from a parabolic trough collector field is used to generate steam; the solar steam is combined with the steam produced in the Unit 15 heat recovery steam generator, and the combined steam flow is directed to one, or both, of the existing 33 MW steam turbine generators.
The plant is expected to generate approximately 1,380 MWh of energy per year, enough for about 180 homes.