SolarPACES (Solar Power and Chemical Energy Systems)
SolarPACES is one of several Technology Collaboration Programmes (TCP) organized in a framework of the International Energy Agency (IEA). It operates as an international network of stakeholders, mostly research institutions, in concentrating solar power (CSP) refining a form of solar power that is dispatchable on demand because it includes thermal energy storage. SolarPACES was created in 1977 and today is increasingly involved in furthering the development of high temperature concentrating solar thermal (CST) to decarbonize industrial processes such as cement making, or to perform solar thermochemistry for the production of solar fuels.
Vision
The SolarPACES vision is that these concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies contribute significantly to the delivery of clean, sustainable energy worldwide. As an international network, SolarPACES supports coordination of international R&D in academia and industry.
By providing leadership as the international network of independent experts, our mission is to facilitate technology development, market deployment and energy partnerships for sustainable, reliable, efficient and cost-competitive concentrating solar technologies.
Mission
To realize this mission; SolarPACES coordinates and advances concentrating solar technology research, by focusing on the next generation of technologies; by providing information and recommendations to policy makers and by organizing international conferences, workshops, reports and task meetings.
SolarPACES helps facilitate market deployment; by providing opportunities for joint projects in order to encourage energy partnerships between countries; by developing guidelines and support standards in order to increase the transparency of the market and reduce risks associated with project development; by managing the undertaking of independent studies of strategic interest and by leveraging these activities with other IEA Technology Collaborative Programmes and renewable energy organizations.
The international research facilitated by SolarPACES leads to advances and cost reductions in thermal solar applications from electricity generation with thermal energy storage to the wide variety of industrial processes requiring steam or heat.
Nations in the high DNI regions of the world are ideally suited to the deployment of CSP projects at utility-scale for power generation that includes solar power after dark. Nations within this global sunbelt are able to complement the fluctuating resources of wind and solar PV through the inclusion of the low-cost thermal energy storage intrinsic to CSP.
In addition to dispatchable solar power with CSP, these regions will be well able to host concentrated solar thermal CST (simple direct heat, no power block) projects for industrial heat processes at temperatures from 200ºC to 600ºC, and solar thermochemistry at higher temperatures up to 1500ºC for the manufacture of solar fuels such as solar hydrogen, solar ammonia, and solar jet fuel for long haul air craft.
