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A novel BALIO desalination method is designed to enable green steel from Western Australia’s Pilbara region iron ores At Perth’s Curtin University in Western Australia, Lina Hockaday is leading a team researching the use of waste brine to upgrade iron ore in a different way, so it can be used to make green steel. Right …
Continue reading “Could waste brine from desalination plants help make steel greener?”
Shouhang HiTech 100 MW CSP Tower at Tangshan Haitai During a trial run in April, 2026, one of the most recent new CSP projects in China, the 100MW tower CSP project at Tangshan Haitai’s 1 GW Qiquanhu PV Industrial Park, set an operation record. It ran continuously and safely around the clock for 96 hours …
Continue reading “Tower CSP at Tangshan Haitai’s massive solar park runs a record 96 hours straight”
Two California electric utilities have moved to exit long-term contracts to buy power from Ivanpah, a unique first-of-its-kind utility-scale solar tower project that has delivered only around 70–80% of its projected annual generation since it began operating in 2014. The partners, which included Google, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison, have cited underperformance …
Replacing the standard two‑tank molten salt system with a single tank using a thermocline could cut capital costs and halve thermal tank losses in concentrated solar power (CSP) plants. But how big can a single tank safely be built when hot and cold molten salts share the same steel wall? Freerk Klasing and his team …
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Performing the solar hybrid sulfur cycle right at the copper smelter could generate the oxygen and hydrogen to make the copper industry green Northern Chile is known for having the best solar resource in the world for concentrated solar thermal (CST). And this region is also where about a quarter of the world’s copper supply …
Continue reading “Why Chile is ideal for deploying the solar sulfur cycle for green copper”
PROMES-CNRS researchers have further advanced their lithium-ion battery recycling using concentrated solar heat. The team has now shown they can recover 76% of the lithium and up to 99.3% of the cobalt at 1100°C. Working with the French battery recycling company SNAM, the PROMES team has modeled and has now demonstrated a proof of concept …
The background For decades, gases have been largely overlooked as heat-transfer fluids in concentrated solar receiver systems, mainly due to their poor heat transfer capability and the high pumping power required. Early research on gaseous heat transfer fluids in solar receivers relied on air at atmospheric pressure in volumetric receivers. Although technically feasible, these systems …
Continue reading “Rethinking Pressurized Gases for Fresnel Solar Receivers”
Volateq has successfully deployed faster drone scans to inspect ball joints in a 100 MW solar plant. The firm is addressing the challenge of staying on top of O&M with a drone-based inspection system capable of scanning an entire solar field in one hour, with results delivered within just another hour. For several months, the …
Continue reading “Volateq’s drone-based monitoring targets key risks in parabolic trough collectors”
In a video call from the US, SolarPACES caught up with Ranga Pitchumani, Editor-in-Chief of Solar Energy, a leading journal in the field. Dr. Pitchumani was the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), SunShot Initiative, Founding Director of its Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) program, and Director of the Initiative’s Systems (Grid) Integration program. …
Continue reading “Ranga Pitchumani – we’ve just started scratching the surface of Gen3 CSP”
A new paper from researchers at PROMES-CNRS in France presents a control strategy to reliably deliver a precise thermal power from concentrated solar to meet industrial heat requirements. The objective was to design a proof-of-concept algorithm for operating a concentrated solar plant, but one intended primarily to deliver heat, and deliver it from thermal energy …
Continue reading “Stored solar heat gets an algorithm to ensure a steady supply”