Yet another use for industrial solar heat – drying wastewater sludge – attracts study at six-minute solar collector maker Absolicon
Absolicon Investigates Wastewater Sludge Drying with 140°C Solar Heat
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CSP News & Analysis
Hot Solar Biomass Gasifier Makes Clean Hydrogen-Rich Syngas
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...
Advance Hot Solar Fuels with “Spillover” Policies
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...
The Economics of Running CSP as a Capacity Resource in the 100% Renewable Future
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...
Why Likana’s 24-Hour Solar Bid under $34/MWh Lost in Chile
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 Heliostat Cost Cuts Helped Likana Bid CSP Under 4 Cents?
Have advances in heliostat mirror solar fields enabled record low prices in Morocco and Dubai and low bids like for Likana in Chile?
Why Lunar Engineering is an Exciting R&D Field for the “Hot Solar”
Out-of-this-world engineering challenges of manufacturing on the Moon hold promise for Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST)
New Strategies Needed to Sell Solar Heat for Mining
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...
Auto Turbocharger to Power Solar-Heated Air for Industrial Drying
Turbochargers were first used to amplify fossil fuel efficiency. Now they could turbocharge solar energy for 100% renewable industrial heat
Can a new kind of CSP be a game changer?
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
A Nanotech Cermet Coating is Just One of Many Gen3 CSP Innovations
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...
Beam-Down Demos First Direct Solar Storage at 1/2 MWh Scale
What if the molten salts in the thermal energy storage tank could simply be heated directly by concentrated solar energy?
Synhelion, Wood Advance 100% Solar Hydrogen
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...
How a Bank Resurrected SolarReserve’s Redstone CSP with ACWA Power
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...
The Fastest Route to Commercialize Solar Hydrogen – is through Australian Copper Mines?
By making solar hydrogen as an industrial service for copper mining, the scale is established for mass production
How a DOE Solar Desalination Award Detoured an Oil Industry Startup’s Plan
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...
100 GWh of Long Duration Energy Storage from MIT
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...
For 100% Renewables, DOE Speeds-up Storage Policy
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...
Could a Perovskite make Cheaper Solar Hydrogen?
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...
Aalborg CSP to Retrofit Coal Plants into Thermal Energy Storage
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...
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CSP News & Analysis
- Researchers create a digital twin to run DAWN, Synhelion’s solar fuels plant
- A buried solar receiver to melt lunar ice
- Solar vacuum pyrolysis leverages the lunar vacuum to mine oxygen
- PSA advances a solar reactor to extract oxygen from lunar ilmenite
- Solar steam from Glasspoint to decarbonize a California mine
- Startup concentrates solar to melt NASA’s lunar landing pads
- How rotating the solar receiver could cut Trough CSP land use
- New star-shaped solar receiver cuts costs and prolongs tower CSP life
- 3D-printed ceramics tested to maximize thermal energy storage in molten salts
- ARPA-E-winning thermal energy storage in sand wins commercial interest
- Sandia’s Gen-3 particle-based CSP demo to debut this fall
- Optimizing the safety factor in high temperature solar absorbers
- Finding an ideal channel geometry inside compact flow gas receivers
- New neural network tool speeds up O&M for Trough CSP
- Vast Energy advances world’s-first solar-powered green methanol demo
- New AI perfects heliostat aim to boost solar tower power
- Solar hydrogen from sulphuric acid recycling to get an industry trial
- A new trigeneration study builds on recaptured waste heat
- Two ways water derailed PG&E’s Ivanpah CSP contract
- Future atmospheric attenuation impacts on central solar tower plants
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