Researchers collaborating between ICV-CSIC in Spain and at the Odeillo solar furnace in France have devised a novel way to maximize thermal energy storage in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants. They wanted to encapsulate the maximum amount of the molten salts used...
"Expanding the amount of energy that can be stored in sand is as simple as adding more sand" Craig Turchi, manager of the Thermal Energy Science and Technologies Research Group at NREL has said. In 2018, a team of researchers at the US National Renewable Energy...
In 2018, three years after the completion of the second of two utility-scale tower-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in the US, the Department of Energy (DOE) held a competition to decide the funding direction for the next generation of Tower CSP. To transfer...
Nearly all the Tower-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in operation use molten salts to transfer heat to produce electricity. This thermal form of solar energy has value because it incorporates stored thermal energy, which enables grid benefits like rolling...
In concentrated solar power (CSP), how well the working fluid transfers heat through a receiver can make or break system efficiency. For solar-heated thermochemistry, solar receivers need to operate at very high temperatures, up to 1400°C. Gases like air are cheap,...
A groundbreaking new AI simulation tool that dramatically improves power plant operations for parabolic Trough-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants has been created by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Michael Wagner, who helped develop the widely...
Methanol has the lowest emissions of all the hydrocarbons. Using concentrated solar thermal energy to heat the thermochemistry to make it (instead of burning a fossil fuel to supply heat) and sourcing the input carbon from green sources would mean the global shipping...
A new study from researchers at CIEMAT’s Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA) in Spain has unveiled a novel application of artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency and safety of solar tower plant operation using reinforcement learning, a form of artificial...
A sulphur-based method for making green hydrogen using a solar hybrid technique that combines concentrated solar heat and electrically driven electrolysis has proven to be more efficient than today’s state-of-the-art electrolysis-only method. “Our studies have shown...
A new trigeneration study just published at Renewable Energy is a collaboration between Fatih Yilmaz from Isparta University of Applied Sciences in Turkiye, and Basharat Jamil from Spain’s IMDEA Energy Institute in Madrid. They have proposed a concept in which three...
PG&E has moved to cut short its 25 year contract with the Ivanpah tower solar project, which comprises three Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) units, each with a central tower supporting its solar receiver, for a total plant capacity of 392 MW. PG&E contracted...
Atmospheric attenuation is projected to increase by varying amounts - depending on how fast we transition from fossil fuels and that impact on the content of atmospheric aerosols, according to the IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) which features new state-of-the-art...
ETH-Zurich, IMDEA Energy, and Synhelion have demonstrated solar syngas production in a solar tower with high efficiency and selectivity Renewable energy - for electricity - can now easily and cheaply replace fossil fuels for electricity, however producing liquid...
To lower the costs of solar fuels and thermal energy storage, concentrated solar thermal (CST) researchers are working on increasing solar thermochemistry's performance and redox cycle-ability. Researchers at Khalifa University of Science and Technology have designed...
Government-funded research into decarbonizing heavy industry using concentrated solar thermal (CST) yields results with the world’s first spin-off based on a new kind of high temperature solar receiver - the falling particle receiver. Because of the simplicity and...
Two international concentrated solar researchers have demonstrated using concentrated solar heat to produce green iron and syngas from renewable biomass, using no-oxygen conversion in a gasifier for a carbon-free process. In their paper, Green iron and syngas...
In concentrated solar thermal (CST) energy collection using parabolic trough-shaped mirrors, the heat from the sun is captured by aiming its reflection from a parabolic trough-shaped mirror onto a thin tube at its central focal point. This thin tube contains a fluid...
A 3D-Printed solar receiver could solve some problems holding back a new technology: High-temperature solar receivers - for solar thermochemistry and industrial heat - can be prone to uneven heat distribution. These temperature differences create thermal stress,...
High-temperature liquid sodium receivers able to run at over 700°C may allow use of modular multi-tower system configurations similar to that being developed by the Australian concentrated solar firm Vast for next-generation sodium-based concentrating solar power...
MIT's Heat-based solar hydrogen from a train of solar reactors boasts 70% heat recovery and heat-to-hydrogen from 10% to 40% In solar reactors that use solar-heated thermo-chemistry to produce hydrogen from water, heat recovery is needed to increase efficiency and,...
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