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...
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’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
Research – and deployment – of low cost and sustainable energy storage technologies are crucial to the long term survival of humans
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....
Synhelion will produce concentrated solar heat at 1500°C for the cement plant and receive highly concentrated CO2 to produce synthetic fuels
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...
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