Standalone thermal storage: “Incredibly cheap grid-scale storage with a very long calendar life” The new Venture Capital (VC) firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) only invests in technologies they vet as both “scientifically feasible at scale” and with the...
Retiring coal power plants could see a new life serving the green economy by storing renewable energy as thermal batteries, delivering the stored energy back to the grid using the former coal plant's existing power blocks and grid connections. Leveraging the low cost...
A study commissioned by the Chilean government and presented before the SolarPACES Conference in Morocco makes data available to potential participants in a Chilean CSP industry. The study, Local Content in CSP:CST Projects- Assessment of the Chilean Industry is...
China could be the first to deploy s-CO2 in CSP The world’s initial Concentrated SolarPower (CSP) plants continue to use the legacy steam cycles of conventional thermal plants. But steam cycle is a mature technology with temperature-based efficiency limits, hampering...
Algae is a potential energy feedstock that is synergistic with solar fuels because algae can be grown in salt water on cheap desert land with a good solar resource, and it also contains the chemicals needed for making solar fuels (hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen)....
The tower form of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is very young technology. Less than a gigawatt is deployed globally, making it a nascent technology at the “Cambrian explosion” stage; multiple innovations are still being explored to cut costs. (How tower CSP works) A...
Thermal energy stored in steel slag could replace fossil fuels used for heat in steel production
With China in the game, the outlook for the technology has gone from from gloomy to better than ever – however it also carries great risk
Renewable energy researchers have been looking into how to cut CO2 emissions from processing industrial minerals like cement and lime, as these are responsible for a high share of the global greenhouse gas emissions. For every 10 tons of cement we produce, we release...
Instead of running air conditioners on fossil-fueled electricity, University of Bergamo researchers Guiseppe Franchini and Antonio Perdichizzi propose an alternative cooling technology; using a thermal form of solar energy to provide solar district cooling in the...
California is a global leader in climate policy, and its goal of 100% clean energy by 2045 is now law in the 5th largest economy after China, the US, Japan and Germany. While the state has had a cap and trade program in place since 2013, it has been the simplicity and...
A New Paper Describes a Solar Thermal Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide with Amino Acids Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) will play a key role in a decarbonized economy because it can produce heat without adding any carbon emissions. Though for centuries we’ve produced heat...
An interview reveals Morocco’s secret: MASEN (the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy) is actually a renewable energy “one stop shop” – starting with climate policy, through needs assessment, planning, infrastructure development and finally structuring to mobilize project finance.
The time is right to consider what went wrong and what went right with Spain’s previous CSP policy - because an election in June put the renewable-friendly coalition that developed it back in power. Spain’s socialist-led coalition government jumpstarted virtually all...
Could a Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) power plant tap the waste heat it produces to desalinate water? Scientists at [simple_tooltip content='National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Denver Colorado One of several national laboratories in the United States under the...
The DOE announced $72 million in funding of three novel pathways to raising temperature and efficiency to lower costs for three CSP tower technologies
Solar thermal energy turns out to be the key to China meeting its climate commitments. A new study investigates the best combination of renewables for providing the lowest cost to power system operators in two of China’s provinces best suited to scale up renewable...
The first-ever 35-year solar power contract – ACWA Power’s with DEWA in Dubai – had a record-low price, for CSP+storage of just 7.3 cents per kWh. Did a longer contract enable the record low price?
Researchers have developed a prototype for calibrating an entire solar field in a single night, shaving months off the current calibration system for large size Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) tower plants. In tower CSP, an encircling solar field of thousands of...
Freshwater shortages are projected to increase in our hotter and more crowded future. Already,150 countries desalinate seawater, using fossil fuels. But supplying an ever-increasing basic need with non-renewable fuels creates a growing threat, according to...
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