What if the molten salts in the thermal energy storage tank could simply be heated directly by concentrated solar energy?
Beam-Down Demos First Direct Solar Storage at 1/2 MWh Scale
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CSP News & Analysis
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...
MIT Proposes PV to Discharge Energy from 2,400°C Silicon Thermal Storage
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...
First-of-its-Kind Experiment with Liquid Metals in Thermocline Energy Storage at Karlsruhe
One of the ways to cut costs in thermal energy storage, whether standalone or as part of tower Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is to use heat transfer fluids able to reach higher temperatures, and with a wider working range between hot and cold than today’s molten...
HelioHeat Commercializes the DLR 1000°C Solar Receiver CentRec®
HelioHeat’s 1,000°C heat at just 1 Cent/kWh potentially ends the use of fossil energy for the production of steel, cement, food and chemicals
TEXEL Explores US Market for 2-Cent Thermal Energy Storage in Metal Hydrides
Research – and deployment – of low cost and sustainable energy storage technologies are crucial to the long term survival of humans
To Make Green Ammonia, US Researchers Design a Novel Solar Process
As a vital component of fertilizers, ammonia (NH3) is the second most-produced industrial chemical in the world. Annual production is around 180 million metric tons and almost 90% of this production goes to meet the global demand for agricultural production....
CEMEX and Synhelion to Demo Zero CO2 Cement
Synhelion will produce concentrated solar heat at 1500°C for the cement plant and receive highly concentrated CO2 to produce synthetic fuels
In South Africa and Spain, CSP is Meeting or Exceeding Projected Operation Targets
South Africa's Bokpoort performance has been "reliably excellent" SolarPACES spoke with Nandu Bhula who has been with the team responsible for the success of ACWA Power’s 50 MW Bokpoort trough Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant in South Africa since the start, first...
Aalborg CSP Cuts Tubing Costs up to 42% with an Asymmetric Receiver
“With the asymmetry of flux levels from the solar field; why not make the receiver also asymmetric to fit better with that,” she explained.
At the SolarPACES Conference, Heliogen Introduces Solar Heat at 1 cent/kWh
Solar PV for electricity is great, but the world needs solar fuels too, fuel for planes, fuel for ships and fuel for steel and cement.
Xavier Lara on How Spain’s Q4 Auction Can Achieve the 5 GW of CSP it Wants
What are the policies that make it possible to actually meet a renewable energy target? Regulators can’t simply decree it happens
Where Very Hot Solar Thermochemistry Research is Today: What’s Needed Next
A state of the art assessment of day or night solar thermochemistry at very high temperatures 1,000ºC to 2,000ºC
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CSP News & Analysis
- How big can a single tank to store molten salts be?
- Why Chile is ideal for deploying the solar sulfur cycle for green copper
- Concentrated solar lithium battery recycling demo bests fossil-fueled recovery rate
- Rethinking pressurized gases for Fresnel solar receivers
- Volateq’s drone-based monitoring targets key risks in parabolic trough collectors
- Ranga Pitchumani – we’ve just started scratching the surface of Gen3 CSP
- Stored solar heat gets an algorithm to ensure a steady supply
- Aluminum melted with Annular Fresnel solar at over 700°C
- Tallying a year’s sun on solar calcination with sCO2 cycles
- 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
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