Switzerland’s International Airport to Buy Synhelion’s First Solar Fuel

Synhelion is researching and developing technology to produce synthetic gas from air and sunlight. This can be processed into fuel that can be burned in standard engines IMAGE@Synhelion Flughafen Zürich AG commits to ETH spin-off Synhelion for CO2 reduction Flughafen Zürich AG aims to cut its CO2 emissions to zero net by 2050. The coronavirus …

New Concentrated Solar Power report offers learnings from Crescent Dunes flop

A new global Concentrated Solar Power report will help developers understand key failings at Crescent Dunes and other early plants and improve investor confidence in future projects, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) told New Energy Update. Crescent Dunes failings included faults in the first-of-a-kind salt storage system. As a dispute over failures at …

Absolicon gets grant for solar thermal plant in Sweden

The Swedish Energy Agency has made a EUR-800,000 (USD 877,000) grant to Absolicon Solar Collector AB for what the latter says will be Europe’s largest solar thermal field for district heating with small concentrated parabolic troughs. Absolicon’s founder Joakim Byström. Photographer: Lars Wahlström The project in question will be realised at a site in the …

New CSP report offers learnings from Crescent Dunes flop

As a dispute over failures at the Crescent Dunes tower plant in Nevada rumbles through US law courts, new findings on global CSP performance could help boost investor confidence in the sector. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has studied 90 CSP projects, including Crescent Dunes, and will publish its findings in the coming …

GlassPoint Solar liquidated after oil and gas slump; India unveils low-cost parabolic troughs

Oil recovery group GlassPoint Solar liquidated California’s GlassPoint Solar has gone into liquidation due to sharp falls in oil and gas prices following the COVID-19 outbreak, Oman’s government, the largest stakeholder in GlassPoint, said in a statement. A concentrated solar heat (CSH) developer specializing in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), GlassPoint developed the giant 1 GW …

Shouhang Yumen 100MW Concentrated Solar Power Project starts building its tower this week

As one of China first batch of 20 demonstration Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) projects, Shouhang Yumen 100 MW Molten Salt Tower CSP Project is currently well prepared to start construction. Early-stage documents have been approved, and the optimization work of receiver tower design is to be completed, the tower building is supposed to be started …

The Cerro Dominador concentrated solar power plant, the first in Chile and Latin America, installs its solar receiver at a height of 220 meters

This is one of the latest milestones in the construction of the solar thermal project being carried out by Acciona and Abengoa in the Atacama desert (Chile) and owned by EIG Global Energy Partners. Weighing 2,300 tons, this highly complex piece will concentrate the solar radiation projected from the 10,600 heliostats surrounding the tower. It …

IIT-M researchers develop low cost Solar Parabolic Trough Collector for use in desalination, space heating, space cooling

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) have developed a low cost Solar ‘Parabolic Trough Collector’ (PTC) system for concentrating solar energy with industrial applications in areas such as desalination, space heating and space cooling, among others. This indigenously designed and developed system was lightweight with high energy efficiency under Indian various climatic and …

Researchers, industry partner to trial solar thermal energy to enhance comminution

The Coalition for Energy Efficient Comminution (CEEC), a global non-profit funded by mining companies, have partnered with the University of Adelaide’s Institute for Mineral and Energy Resources (IMER) to trial the use of solar thermal energy to enhance comminution. Comminution is the process by which solid materials are reduced to smaller average particle size by …