Following the success of the world’s largest battery, South Australia is aiming to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant. SolarReserve’s $650 million, 150 megawatt Aurora solar thermal plant has received state development approval. Construction of the facility will begin this year.
Australia’s top science and research organisation, the CSIRO, has inked a deal with Chinese company Thermal Focus to make, sell and install its patented concentrating solar thermal generation technology in China. The partnership is a major coup for the CSIRO, particularly considering the potential market for CST in China, which just last month was named by the IEA as one of the countries most likely to lead the world in a solar
China’s plans for CST – to build 1.4GW of capacity 2018, and 5GW by 2020 – will double the world’s installed CST plants, and the CSIRO deal puts its proven solar heliostat technology in a prime position to bid for a piece of this action.
During the mid-noughties I thought that solar thermal power was going to become in the dominant form of renewable energy in the medium term - failing to foresee just how dramatic the price and performance improvements for solar PV and energy storage would be over the following decade.
Back then a vision called Desertec promised cheap, clean north African solar power providing Europe with a healthy slice of its energy needs (and reducing dependence on Russian gas as a side benefit).
The vision slowly faded as it become clearer that Europe could be largely self-sufficient in renewable energy and that building the grid interconnects between Africa and Europe was going to take along time to eventuate. The organisation pivoting in 2013 to focus more on supplying local power demand, particularly in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
There have been some concerns voiced about the 2.25 GW Tunisian project at Tunur in particular, which still aims to export power to Europe in spite of local power shortages by 2018, via a HVDC interconnect to Malta.
Noor 1, the first phase of the Moroccan plant, has already surpassed expectations in terms of the amount of energy it has produced. ... Noor 2 will be similar to the first phase, but Noor 3 will experiment with a different design. Instead of ranks of mirrors it will capture and store the Sun’s energy with a single large tower, which is thought to be more efficient. Seven thousand flat mirrors surrounding the tower will all track and reflect the sun’s rays towards a receiver at the top, requiring much less space than existing arrangement of mirrors. Molten salts filling the interior of the tower will capture and store heat directly, doing away with the need for hot oil.
Similar systems are already used in South Africa, Spain and a few sites in the US, such as California’s Mojave desert and Nevada. But at 86ft (26m) tall, Ouarzazate’s recently erected structure is the highest of its kind in the world. Other plants in Morocco are already underway. Next year construction will begin at two sites in the south-west, near Laayoune and Boujdour, with plants near Tata and Midelt to follow.
The success of these plants in Morocco – and those in South Africa - may encourage other African countries to turn to solar power. South Africa is already one of the world’s top 10 producers of solar power and Rwanda is home to east Africa’s first solar plant, which opened in 2014. Large plants are being planned for Ghana and Uganda.
The company recently announced it’s hoping to build a 2,000 megawatt facility in Nevada called Sandstone. With a planned 10 towers and more than 100,000 concentrating mirrors, the plant would be the largest of its type anywhere in the world. It would overshadow SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes plant, currently the largest in the US with 110 megawatts of capacity.
The latest mid-term renewable energy outlook document from the International Energy Agency says China, Chile, Morocco and South Africa are likely to take a lead in solar thermal developments in the next five years. There is no mention of Australia.
The IEA says there are currently about 4.6GW of large-scale solar thermal projects in the world, around half of them in Spain, which led early development. Over the next five years, it sees an additional 6.4GW of solar thermal – nearly all of it with storage – although this figure could nearly double in its “accelerated” deployment scenario.
The ANU team, whose CST technology harnesses the power of the sun using a 500 square meter solar concentrator dish, made the breakthrough by redesigning the system’s receiver in a way that halved its convection losses and boosted its conversion of sunlight into steam from 93 per cent to 97 per cent.
According to the ANU’s Dr John Pye, the new design could result in a 10 per cent reduction in the cost of solar thermal electricity. “Ultimately the work in this project is all about reducing the cost of concentrating solar thermal energy,” he said. “Our aim is to get costs down to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity, so that this technology will be competitive.
One time Liberal party leader John Hewson (now chairman of a company called SolarStor) made a splash in the media today with an announcement of solar thermal power plant in Port Augusta in South Australia.
Renew Economy has the details - Hewson’s Solastor promises world’s cheapest 24/7 solar power.
The 170MW, $1.2 billion project was officially launched in Adelaide on Tuesday by Hewson, who said he was confident the technology could produce the lowest-price 24/7 solar power in the world.
According to Solastor, this is “the ideal technology” to replace the almost 20,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plants “that will inevitably be phased out over the next 10 to 20 years,” as well as diesel generation systems such as those used in remote communities, islands and mine sites. In Australia alone, the company says, there could be a market for 400 Solastor plants.
The costs being quoted are so low that even RE's Giles Parkinson is being a little wary, sounding some notes of caution - Hewson’s enthusiasm for solar towers is welcome, but wild claims are not.
The proposed plant will use graphite rather than molten salt for heat storage - apparently they licenced the Lloyd Energy Systems / Larkden technology for this (according to a SolarStor web page now only available through Google cache).
Australia isn't the only country with new CSP plants being planned - RE also has an article about project announcement in Dubai - Dubai plans world’s biggest, and cheapest, solar tower + storage project.
Solar thermal power is struggling to compete with solar PV at this stage of its development cycle but projects still seem to be getting over the line regardless.
While Port Augusta waits to see if any solar thermal power plants will be constructed in the town, one project which has gone ahead is a smaller solar tower providing electricity, heat and desalinated water to a tomato farm.
The company behind the project is Aalborg CSP. The project consists of a tower with a 234-tonne central boiler and 23,000 mirrors.
The "Integrated Energy System" will be the first large-scale CSP-based technology in the world to provide multiple energy streams – heating, fresh water and electricity – for horticultural activities.
Port Augusta's ageing coal mines and coal fired power plants have been destined for closure for some time, with the clock finally winding down on them and the remaining Northern Power plant scheduled to close down in May.
There have been various proposals to build alternative solar power based generation facilities in the region as a replacement, leveraging some of the existing infrastructure, however most of these have been abandoned.
Now that new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has decided to keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation alive (dumping plans by his incompetent predecessor to shut it down), a new push has begun to build a solar thermal power plant in the Port Augusta area.
The latest plan is for US company SolarReserve to build a 110MW solar tower plant, similar to the Crescent Dunes facility in Nevada.
The Australian company has developed what it hopes will be a low-cost, high-efficiency Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) generation technology. The Jemalong pilot plant will be ready for commissioning in mid-January and is designed to prove the technology works.
The plant will be a 110 MW tower type with molten salts as working fluid and energy storage medium, this will be the first commercial project for Abengoa with the molten salt technology for tower plants. With the design provided by the Spanish company, the plant will be able to generate electricity for up to 17.5 hours without solar radiation, only with the heat stored in the molten salt tanks.
The project will be located in the Atacama Desert, the region with the highest solar radiation concentrations in the world. It will be the first solar-thermal plant for direct electricity production in South America.
Solar-thermal tower technology uses a series of mirrors (heliostats) that track the sun on two axes, concentrating the solar radiation on a receiver on the upper part of the tower where the heat is transferred to the molten salts. The salts then transfer their heat in a heat exchanger to a water current to generate superheated and reheated steam, which feeds a turbine capable of generating around 110 MW of power.
The EIA projects that the solar thermal generating stations expected to come online this year, each funded by U.S. Department of Energy loans, will generate about 641 megawatts of electricity, which will add to the current 476 megawatts of solar-thermal capacity in the U.S. prior to the new plants starting operations. Later this year and in 2014, a total of six new solar thermal projects are expected to begin operating, generating a total of 1,257 megawatts of new power generating capacity. Those projects will represent 4 percent of all new additions to U.S. electric generating capacity for 2013 and 2014, according to EIA data.
The two largest solar thermal power plants beginning operation this year are Abengoa Solar’s 250-megawatt Solana power plant in Gila Bend, Ariz., and BrightSource Energy’s 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave Desert. Both plants are larger than any other solar thermal generating station ever built in the U.S. “They’re a new breed,” said EIA solar power analyst Gwen Bredehoeft. “There’s going to be a lot of interest in watching how they perform.”
Until the technology and economics of solar thermal are proven, little growth in capacity is exp
The ground-breaking Gemasolar Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant with storage near Seville, Spain, has marked its second anniversary with another breakthrough – producing round the clock power for a record breaking 36 consecutive days.
The power plant, owned by Torresol Energy, has been producing energy for two years since its official opening on October 4, 2011. It was the first large scale solar tower power plant to use molten salt, which captures heat during the day so that the plant can still produce energy at night.
Torresol said in a statement marking the anniversary that the plant has exceeded the expected results and has demonstrated the sturdiness of the design. Producing energy 24/7 for 36 consecutive days from solar energy “is something that no other plant has performed so far.”
When I visited the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which sits in the Mojave Desert on the border between California and Nevada, I had to be careful where I looked. The engineers warned me not to look directly at the receivers arrayed on top of the centralized solar towers, which collected the desert sunlight concentrated by thousands of mirrors on the desert floor. The solar receiver was as bright as the heart of the sun, glowing with a retina-melting white. I had to force myself to look away.
Jamey Stillings, though, has far better eyes than I do. A photographer known for his work capturing mega-scale projects like the new bridge at the Hoover Dam, Stillings has been tracking the construction of Ivanpah since 2010, when he began an aerial survey of the site. His epic black-and-white images of Ivanpah reveal how different this solar plant is from other major infrastructure projects. Unlike solar photovoltaic plants, which generate electricity directly from sunlight, Ivanpah uses hundreds of thousands of curved mirrors to reflect and concentrate the desert sunshine. Three tall solar towers, each ringed by the mirrors, collect the heat and generate steam, which drives electric turbines. When it finally opens later this year, it will be the biggest solar thermal plant in the world.
The Khi Solar One concentrating solar power plant is now one step closer to reality with the recent completion of the Khi Solar One tower in the Northern Cape province, near Upington, in South Africa. The company behind the 50 MW project — Abengoa, together with its partners the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the Khi Community Trust — recently held a ceremony to commemorate the important milestone. An important milestone with regard to the project itself, and also with regard to the pursuit of South Africa’s renewable energy goals.
The newly completed 205-meter tall tower — which will be the centerpiece of, and driving force behind the 50 MW concentrating solar power (CSP) plant — represents a significant advance in solar tower efficiency, possessing both the capacity for higher temperatures than previous designs, and also a new ‘innovative’ dry-cooling system. ...
Khi Solar One, a 50 megawatt (MW) superheated steam solar tower with two hours of thermal storage, and KaXu Solar One, Abengoa’s 100 MW parabolic trough plant also under construction in the Northern Cape, will be the first concentrating solar power plants in operation in South Africa. The South Africa Department of Energy intends to bring 17,800 MW online from renewable sources by 2030, framing South Africa’s strategy for energy independence.
The report used land use data from 72 percent of all large solar plants installed in the U.S., and found that the total area requirements for a photovoltaic (PV) plant between 1 and 20 megawatt capacity is 8.3 acres per MW. For larger PV plants, the total area needed is 7.9 acres per MW, while concentrating solar power plants (CSP) need 10 acres per MW. When weighted by generation rather than capacity, the larger PV plants (3.4 acres per gigawatt-hour per year) and CSP plants (3.5 acres/GWh/year) do a bit better than smaller PV plants (4.1 acres/GWh/year).
This isn't the first time NREL has looked at solar land use, though it is the first time they used a whole lot of actual power plants to figure out the numbers. In the past, they estimated that to power all of the U.S. with solar power, it would require 0.6 percent of all the area in the country.
The new report says that a PV plant capable of powering 1 000 homes needs 32 acres. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are around 115 million occupied and fully used homes in the country. If we just scale up linearly (which is not, of course, how this would actually work), that means 3.68 million acres to power all of them. That's equivalent to 5 750 square miles, or around 0.1 percent of all the land the US has to offer.
Zero hedge has some charts (from Goldman Sachs by the look of them) illustrating various trends related to renewable energy - the LCOE one being the most interesting to me as it demonstrates why solar thermal power hasn't yet had the impact I was hoping it would - Eight "Alternative" Charts.
The South Australia city of Port Augusta may be a long way from getting the solar thermal power station it craves, but it may soon host a world-leading technology that uses solar thermal energy to power a huge greenhouse to grow food in the desert.
Sundrop Farms, which has built a pilot station (we wrote about it here) featuring its unique technology that uses solar thermal energy to desalinate water for irrigation, and for heating and cooling, has secured finance from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to build a 20 hectare commercial greenhouse around 10kms south of the city.
The massive greenhouse will feature concentrated solar power technology – most likely a parabolic trough array that will deliver around 36MWth (megawatt thermal) of energy. This will make it the largest stand alone CSP arrays in the country. The overall project cost has not been revealed but is believed to be at least $100 million. It will employ more than 200 people.
Port Augusta has been fighting to have its ageing and polluting coal-fired power stations replaced by concentrated solar thermal technologies to produce electricity.
The 20-hectare greenhouse facility will produce over 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year for metropolitan markets across Australia, and the company hopes it will be the fore-runner of many more projects in Australia and other desert regions, particularly in the Middle East and north Africa.
The technology is similar to that featured in another project in Qatar that RenewEconomy reported on last year. Indeed, SunDrop advised on that technology. But while that Qatari project was funded with development funds from Norway, the Port Augusta project will be funded on a commercial basis.
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