The president of Protermosolar, Luis Crespo, will preside over the first plenary session of the SolarPACES 2019 congress, the most important international event in the solar thermal sector to be held from October 1 to 4 in Daegu, South Korea.
In addition to the chairmanship of said plenary session called CSP Market and Projects, Luis Crespo will make two strategic and technical interventions that will highlight the main factors that will contribute to the future development of the solar thermal energy sector.
The first of the presentations will focus on the unexplored functionalities of the thermal storage of concentrated solar power plants that, in addition to allowing the complementary dispatch to the photovoltaic generation, from sunset, could maintain a strategic reserve for the system electricity could always count on the availability of solar thermal power plants at peak demand hours, regardless of whether or not that day or days or weeks had been sunny. In addition, adding electric heaters could perform price arbitration functions, as today they perform the pumping facilities or take advantage of the spills of other non-manageable technologies with infinitely smaller investments than the battery installations or new pumping plants.
Another contribution of Luis Crespo will be to present a new conceptual design of the tower plants that allow them to increase their efficiency and make them modular and scalable to usual sizes in conventional thermal power plants, reducing the relative investments associated with the power block to make them, by so much more competitive. The concept is based on unit modules of heliostats and tower fields, with a north arrangement instead of circulating and transporting hot salts to a single storage system with a single turbine. In this way, the towers could be a little over 100 meters high with heliostat fields equivalent to 30/40 MW, standardizing their design and that of the receivers, as has happened with the technology of parabolic trough collectors.
Luis Crespo will take the opportunity of his participation in the most important international event in the sector to call attention to the contributions of research centers are directed primarily to innovations close to the market, to effectively contribute to the reduction of vital cost reduction in these moments.
Protermosolar is the association that represents the Spanish sector of the concentrated solar power industry and is made up of 48 members. The solar thermal technology, in which Spain is an international leader, has recently broken into the global renewable energy landscape and currently has great growth potential due to its manageability and storage capacity, due to its high job creation local and for its potential for cost reduction. The installed capacity in Spain is 2,300 MW and the contribution of Spanish companies in international markets is around 75%.