In solar reactors for making solar fuels at high temperatures, ceria's behavior when heated makes it state-of-the-art for unlocking the thermochemistry involved. (How solar fuels are made). But its structure lacks “intelligent design.” So a precisely controlled design...
Using a bubble column reactor at Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, the Liquid Metal Laboratory team is working on producing hydrogen from methane, the cheapest method, but without CO2 emissions - the problem with the cheapest method. The main product, besides...
A team of Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has combined three tools to assess the economic viability of a hybrid CSP and desalination plant applicable for any region worldwide. “The interesting thing is you can modify this by...
By manipulating the shape of heliostats in real time, the optical efficiency of solar fields for tower CSP can be significantly increased, according to a paper presented at the New Mexico SolarPACES Conference: Heliostat with Automatic Shape Adjustment for High...
The solar receiver on view at this year’s SolarPACES Conference site tour in October will be the first that many attendees have seen. This solar receiver is designed for very high temperature liquid sodium as its heat transfer fluid up in a solar tower, with a solar...
Why Vast plans to include methanol production in their CSP project Methanol is used to make many chemicals, but what makes producing green methanol most interesting for the future is that the shipping industry, finally having to deal with climate emissions, considers...
The Crescent Dunes CSP project in the US was the first of a kind: The first tower CSP with thermal energy storage at full-scale; 110 MW. (Above about 150 MW, the distances of the solar field encircling the tower receiver has optical limits) It was developed by the...
Synhelion's solar receiver achieves a temperature of 1,500°C and higher. That's unprecedented. Even the Gen3 particle-based solar receiver being pilot-scale tested now at Sandia - and the DLR CentRec receiver licensed to Heliogen - operate at the (relatively!) lower...
Green ammonia could be made sustainably using solar thermochemistry instead of the way it is made today in the fossil-fueled Haber-Bosch process, which taps fossil energy for the thermochemistry and the heat and the high pressure it requires, while emitting almost...
One of the new CSP projects Three Gorges Renewables is building is a novel dual-tower design at Guazhou, in Gansu Province
Ten years ago, GlassPoint CEO Rod MacGregor bucked the typical business plan for solar developers, both PV and CSP (How CSP works): Sign an electricity contract with an electric utility to sell your solar power by the kilowatt-hour for 25 years and try to get...
Xavier Lara’s consultancy AELIUS Energies SLU to champion green ammonia for shipping before an audience of major shipbuilders in Qingdao China
Fractal steel texturing could solve the corrosive effect of higher temperature solar salts in tomorrow's Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) We recently caught up with Dr. Ranga Pitchumani, who was the Chief Scientist for the SunShot Initiative, Founding Director of its...
Solar even under grey skies 365 days a year: Typically, simplicity equals low costs. But the creators of a multi-technology thermochemical energy storage system for Gen3 concentrating solar power (CSP) claim that their complex design would bring costs down by enabling...
Heat-recovery ideas for solar reactors existed as theories “but not to actually go to the lab, build a device and try to make it work.”
The molten salt mixture deployed in today’s commercial CSP plants for thermal energy storage is liquid at 565°C and degrades at higher temperatures. Yet higher temperatures would increase thermal efficiency. So how can we develop a molten salt mix that can reach...
Three years ago, Abengoa thermal energy storage engineer Cristina Prieto exchanged the relatively secretive world of commercial CSP for academia. Now, as the professor for a newly created thermal energy storage discipline at the School of Engineering at the University...
Tower CSP thermal storage initially had a tank leak problem. Vast Solar says they have the solution
Adding nickel to ceria can yield solar syngas at lower temperatures - at just 700°C Solar thermochemistry researchers at the University of Florida and Synhelion tried a new way to generate syngas, the precursor to hydrocarbon fuels like jet fuel or diesel. Solar...
Goal: ensure the quartz window never exceeds 300°C, despite solar receiver temperatures above 1500°C – keeping thermal efficiency over 50%
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