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IMAGE@Fontina Petrakopoulou and Eduardo de la Rocha Camba analyzed the viability of the idea using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based on underground temperature of 20°C in the arid Iberian Peninsula, for a hypothetical 20 MW CSP solar tower. This first concept entails 99 hectares of PVC tubes with a diameter of a half meter, sunk …
Continue reading “A New Way to Dry Cool Solar Thermal Power Plants – with Underground Air”
IMAGE@HELIOVIS – How the pneumatic solar collector (right) is inflated inside a metal frame HELIOVIS has been running a demo plant in Spain for two years demonstrating their novel low-cost blow-up plastic tube solar collector for CSP. The small startup is fighting hard to get the industry-scale financial backing needed to introduce the technology and …
Continue reading “ Clean Tech Investment Challenge in Commercializing Innovations like HELIOtube”
IMAGE@News.cn Wet cooling of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants would be preferable if there was plenty of available water, because it promotes greater thermal efficiency. However, most CSP tends to be built in very arid regions, and so for environmental reasons, developers increasingly get these solar thermal power projects permitted only by planning less-efficient dry …
Continue reading “Irrigation Water Used to First Cool a Solar Thermal Power Project”
IMAGE @SENER The molten salt receiver at the Gemasolar CSP project in Spain Working at the Institute of Solar Research in the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt: DLR), mechanical engineer Cathy Frantz and her colleagues have developed a very different shape for the solar receiver that sits atop the tower in …
Continue reading ““Star” Receiver Could Cut Tower CSP Cost 11%”
At one of the three towers comprising the 392MW Ivanpah CSP project in California, Brightsource Director of Chemistry, Yaniv Binyamin checks the coating on the receiver panel, in a sky climber IMAGE@Brightsource Energy Testing laboratories in Germany, France and Spain have confirmed the effectiveness of a new high-performance (97% absorbance) optical coating developed by Brightsource …
Continue reading “Brightsource Innovates a Solar-cured Coating for DEWA Tower CSP”
Stellio heliostat: at the test facilities at PSA in Spain, DLR researchers Tim Schlichting and Marc Röger measured the Stellio optical efficiency using photogrammetry, deflectometry, modal analyses, deflectometry and beam characterization. IMAGE @CSPPlaza It is rare for an innovation in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) to go from the lab to commercial in just 5 years. …
Continue reading “A Novel CSP Heliostat Goes from Lab to Market in Just 5 Years”
IMAGE@NREL ARPA-E has challenged researchers to innovate a storage technology that can be deployed in almost any location and charge and discharge electricity, at a low fixed cost per cycle, for up to 4 days. The DAYS (Duration Addition to electricitY Storage) challenge is to supply an unmet market need – to provide grid-scale …
IMAGE @Cerro Dominador/Energia This week, the Cerro Dominador Group/EIG Global Energy Partners bought the Likana Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project from US-based SolarReserve, which was unable to complete the project. SolarReserve had already developed Likana by accomplishing the preliminary work of siting and monitoring local DNI and taking it through Chile’s environmental permitting process, but …
Continue reading “Rebirth of SolarReserve’s 450 MW Likana Brings CSP Supply Chain Hope for Chile”
VastSolar pioneers cutting edge high temperature sodium as heat transfer, and proposes multiple smaller solar fields like early tower CSP to gain the modular advantages of PV IMAGE@VastSolar At the 2019 SolarPACES Conference, Vast Solar took the SolarPACES Technical Innovation Award for their use of high temperature sodium-based HTF in tower CSP, presented in their …
Good Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) is needed for manufacturing solar hydrogen IMAGE@SolarGIS For countries such as Japan or South Korea with poor DNI and little space for wind and solar, the value of hydrogen is that it can be made overseas with renewable energy, then stored and shipped, and used to produce electricity, heat, or …
Continue reading “Japan and Australia Test Solar Hydrogen Component”