Strong Mexican-German liaisons promote SHIP
During an event in Mexico City on 30 August, a collaboration agreement was signed to establish a platform for promoting solar heat in Mexico. The leading institutions of this collaboration are ANES, the national solar energy association, and Solar Payback partner, DKTI Solar, the Large-Scale Solar Energy Programme by the German Agency for International Cooperation; and CONUEE, the National Commission for Energy Efficiency.
Despite accelerating growth of the PV sector resulting from the energy reform implemented by the Mexican government last year, the solar heating sector is not lagging behind. Solar thermal technologies are well-known and the country ranks second in Latin-America in installed collector capacity with 12.3 million m2. Recently, especial attention is being paid to SHIP. The three partners will advance the creation of an inter-institutional platform, where stakeholders from government and administration, the private sector (industrial end users, SHIP service and technology providers), academia, research, and financing can exchange ideas and join forces to work on new projects.
The solar process heat market in Mexico has a considerable size. By the beginning of September 2017, 59 SHIP plants have been registered in the online platform SHIP-plants.info, including installations in several industries such as food & beverage, pharmaceutical, and chemical products. According to the last survey carried out by solrico in November 2016 among 71 suppliers of turnkey SHIP systems worldwide, two Mexican companies ranked second and third by the number of reference projects: Inventive Power with 35 projects with parabolic trough collectors and Módulo Solar with 33 installations with flat plate collectors.
