With China’s massive state-owned enterprises (SOE) like China General Nuclear, PowerChina and Three Gorges (famous for the 22MW dam) completing 26 full-scale concentrated solar power (CSP) projects in the last few years, and with even more than that under...
Concentrated solar power researchers have long known that porous ceramic “volumetric” receivers can deliver very high temperatures. What a new study from Cranfield University shows is that the internal shape of the cavity impacts heat retention. After testing...
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 now, most of Western Australia’s Pilbara region iron ore is...
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 straight, with...
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....
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
Solar researchers at Fraunhofer Chile have designed, built, and tested a complete solar collector and crucible system for melting and recycling aluminum, heated by Annular Fresnel solar collectors. In Annular Fresnel, each mirror is flat, like a Fresnel mirror, but...
Solar calcination + sCO2 cycle In a year-round California-based study, a Chilean research team has continued to advance a potentially more cost-effective and efficient form of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) that leverages limestone's heat generation during...
Collaborating with Synhelion engineers, a solar research team at the Solar-Institute Jülich (SIJ) of FH Aachen presented two papers at SolarPACES 2025 assessing the accuracy and reliability of dynamic process models for a solar fuel production system. They used...
A NASA-funded research team at Georgia Tech has developed a method for extracting water from the Moon to generate the hydrogen and oxygen needed for propulsion fuels for solar system exploration. They describe their experimental work in Thermal extraction of H2O(s)...
Following their review, published at Astra Astronautica, covering all previous research using concentrated solar energy to generate heat for melting lunar regolith, co-authors Stéphane Abanades, Sylvain Rodat and PhD student, Jack Robinot, propose that the most...
IMAGE from: Terrestrial Demonstrator for the Hydrogen Extraction of Oxygen from Lunar Regolith with Concentrated Solar Energy °C Thorsten Denk Working at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA), aerospace engineer Thorsten Denk has further refined his solar reactor for...
GlassPoint has secured a partnership to generate its solar steam for Searles Valley Minerals (SVM), a hundred- and fifty-year-old California mining and production firm, one of the largest local employers with over 600 employees. The mining firm operates the mine and...
SolarPACES interviews Ryan Garvey, Founder and Principal Research Scientist at Outward Technologies, which has NASA funding to develop its concentrated solar system for resource extraction, surface construction, and habitat development on the Moon and other planetary...
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