Concrete cabins for solar power farms

Precast concrete manufacturer Rocla has entered into a manufacturing-under-licence agreement with Spain-based precast concrete cabin supplier Prephor to manufacture precast concrete cabins to supply South Africa’s budding photovoltaic (PV) farms.

The development of PV farms in South Africa has positive implications for the tour-ism, commercial and residential sectors, as well as for the communities who depend on the national power grid.

“With the PV farm developments comes the need to house the associated instrumentation in an environmentally friendly, practical and secure way,” says Rocla sales engineer Justin Kretzmar.

The moulds for the concrete cabins, manu-factured in Serbia by an Italian company, arrived at Rocla’s Roodepoort factory in June. Rocla started manufacturing these concrete cabins in July and is manufacturing at a rate of one cabin a day. Currently, the company has orders for 128 cabins.

To accommodate its new product offering, Rocla renovated one of its existing production areas at its Roodepoort factory to produce, demould, cure, fit and paint the cabins in the same area without having to move the cabins around in the yard.

In addition, a 25 t gantry crane was brought in to increase the facility’s total lifting capacity from 25 t to 50 t. A specialised tilting device and lifting beam were also designed for the facility, says Kretzmar.

Generally, for each megawatt of energy pro-duced, one 9-m-long, 2.6-m-wide, 3.1-m-high and 30 t cabin is required. The cabins are offered in different sizes and the doors, ventilation grills and fans are customisable.

“We have an enormous amount of experi-ence within the European PV farm market, but none in South Africa and other African countries, so it made economic sense to enter the South African arena with Rocla, who has nearly 100 years of precast concrete experience.

“We believe that the development of PV farms is but one outlet for the concrete cabins, which are also suitable for a variety of other industrial applications in South Africa,” says Prephor technical manager David Merino.