Biomass gasification using steam and oxygen is an already mature technology for extracting hydrogen, which requires heat at above 700°C. To generate the heat for gasification, traditionally, some of the biomass itself is burnt. But this combustion emits several...
A pair of policy researchers at Potsdam University’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany have a suggestion for policy to advance high temperature Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) technologies. Today’s commercially operating Concentrated Solar...
A new paper to be published in the journal Energy Conversion and Management: X: Using Concentrating-Solar-Power Plants as Economic Carbon-Free Capacity Resources - develops an approach to assessing the capacity contribution from CSP plants with thermal energy storage...
At the annual SolarPACES Conference (held virtually for the second year) Cerro Dominador’s CEO Fernando Gonzalez answered questions from the international network of concentrated solar power (CSP) researchers and developers attending about exactly what happened in the...
Have advances in heliostat mirror solar fields enabled record low prices in Morocco and Dubai and low bids like for Likana in Chile?
Out-of-this-world engineering challenges of manufacturing on the Moon hold promise for Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST)
Direct solar heat - Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) - is a potential renewable resource for replacing heat from burning fossil fuels for industries like mining, as its technologies generate heat directly from sunlight at anywhere from 150°C to 1500°C. But lack of...
Turbochargers were first used to amplify fossil fuel efficiency. Now they could turbocharge solar energy for 100% renewable industrial heat
High temperature CSP with very long duration storage in Bauxite particles can top off the 100% renewable grid says Sandia lead solar researcher Cliff Ho
Innovating new energy technologies is more akin to making a movie with a cast and crew of thousands than the stereotype of the one lone inventor in a garage coming up with the whole thing alone. An example is the US Department of Energy grant to try three different...
What if the molten salts in the thermal energy storage tank could simply be heated directly by concentrated solar energy?
The ETH spin-off Synhelion is working on commercializing its very high-temperature solar thermochemical fuels (like jet fuel and hydrogen) and has already formed partnerships with several larger firms making cement or aviation fuel to advance step by step towards its...
SolarPACES interviewed Bernard Geldenhuys, the Senior Transactor in the Power and Infrastructure team at Investec Bank, a lender with 8,300 employees that has been closely involved in the 100 MW Redstone solar power tower since 2018, when its delayed PPA was signed...
By making solar hydrogen as an industrial service for copper mining, the scale is established for mass production
Ten years as a patent attorney with Exxon Mobil initially predisposed Gary Katz to see purification of “produced water” at oil wells as the market for the off-grid desalination startup he founded and bootstrapped in 2016, aiming to use the industry’s own wasted gas it...
A very large-scale long duration energy storage (LDES) idea from MIT envisages a 1 kilometer-long, 60 meter-wide lidded central storage container of rocks sunk 20 meters down into the ground - about the size of 10 football fields if they were laid end to end. The idea...
DOE workshops educate regulators on long duration energy storage (LDES) A Federal energy project funded through the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity has initiated workshops designed to help state utility regulators determine best practices in...
A perovskite may be more cost-effective than ceria for solar-driven thermochemical hydrogen production, a new paper suggests. One perovskite formulation that works at a slightly lower temperature than ceria is explored by Xin Qian in the paper Outstanding Properties...
Researchers at DLR, and NREL, and the Bill Gates-funded start-up Malta have been investigating converting coal plants into grid-scale thermal energy storage for curtailed intermittent renewable energy, as low-cost heat “batteries.” (Thermal energy storage was...
The MIT team estimates their thermal “battery” designed for long duration - 100 hours or more - would be half the cost of today’s cheapest grid-scale energy storage; pumped hydro. A very intriguing idea for long-duration gigawatt-scale grid thermal energy storage...
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