SENER

SENER Grupo de Ingeniería controls 60% of Torresol Energy. The Spanish holding contributes with all its experience in the design of high technology that has positioned it as a leader in world engineering.

SENER is a private engineering and technology group founded in Bilbao in 1956, that seeks to offer its customers the most advanced technological solutions and which enjoys international recognition for its commitment to innovation, its quality and its independence. Among the technology innovations that have placed SENER at the forefront of the Concentrating Solar Power, SENER has developed from the software, the Sensol program that allows to size and optimise plants, to the components such as the heliostats, the heliostats axis drive mechanisms, the tower receivers, the storage systems and the use of molten salts, direct steam generation systems and beam-down or plant control systems, as well as the parabolic trough collectors. In the case of the collectors, SENER has patented the SENERtrough design with an appreciably lower steel weight and assembly time than other similar collectors. However, the big technological difference of SENER’s solar thermal plants lies in the innovative molten salts storage system, which significantly increases the energy exploitation level of a conventional thermosolar power station and that SENER has applied for the first time on an industrial scale in the world.

SENER groups its own engineering activities as well as its industrial holdings in companies working in the Energy and Environmental fields, as well as in Aerospace.

In this way SENER materialises its projects from three main business areas.

• From the Energy and Environmental Division, through the development of new processes in the treatment of waste and oils under the premise of efficient energy use. Also, in recent years, this division has concentrated its efforts on Concentrated Solar Power initiatives, leading the creation of Torresol Energy.
• The Engineering Division, known as SENER Ingeniería y Sistemas, S.A., offers technological, design and construction services in the Power and Process, Aerospace, Civil Engineering and Architecture and Marine sectors. SENER Ingeniería y Sistemas, S.A. has offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville, Valencia, Algiers, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Mexico DF, San Francisco, Warsaw, Abu Dhabi and Okayama (Japan).
• And the Aerospace Division is dedicated mainly to the area of gas turbines for aeronautical propulsion. Headed up by the Industria de Turbo Propulsores (ITP), a joint venture with Rolls Royce, this is the only Spanish company that designs, builds and maintains gas turbines and aviation engines.

SENER’s capacity for forward thinking in the Concentrating Solar Power field, as well as its ambitious programme for technological developments have always been aimed at resolving the problems to obtain electricity from solar energy on a large scale in two sectors with a commercial implementation: systems based on parabolic trough collectors and those based on central tower and heliostat systems.