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 recent Chilean energy auctions with the record-low bid for CSP at under $34/MWh. [...]
Bruce Anderson, CEO of 247Solar Inc., will speak at the International CSP Focus 2021 Conference in Beijing, China on Friday, October 29, 2021. There he will present new modular, ultra-high temperature CSP technology that makes the unique round-the-clock benefits of Concentrated Solar Power available at costs that rival daytime-only PV. [...]
Cerro Dominador, a subsidiary of EIG Partners, has just bid the 450 MW Likana tower CSP plant it procured from SolarReserve several years ago at under 4 cents/kWh. Was the record low bid enabled by cost reduction in tower CSP heliostat solar fields? To learn the current status of heliostat [...]
The cost of renewables, meanwhile, continued to fall even in 2020, despite Covid-linked disruption. The cost of electricity from utility-scale solar PV declined by 7% year-on-year, while offshore wind fell by 9%, onshore wind 13% and concentrating solar power by 16%. Between 2000 and 2020, renewables capacity grew more [...]
The goal of the Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) is to accelerate the development and deployment of solar technology to support an equitable transition to a decarbonized electricity system by 2035 and decarbonized energy sector by 2050. Achieving this goal will support the nationwide effort to meet the [...]
A hybrid Concentrated Solar Power-PV plant with 13 hours of storage is the lowest cost power generation option for low-carbon baseload power in Chile, researchers at the Fraunhofer Chile Research Foundation said in a new report. The researchers studied four hybrid plant concepts and found that a combined CSP solar [...]
Engineers at Aalborg CSP have developed, designed and optimized an asymmetric solar receiver to pair with a new heliostat from the Spanish firm Tewer Engineering as part of the PHOTON project, which aims to reap more competitive configurations and simplify assembly and commissioning operations for Concentrated Solar Power tower plants [...]
Well before Bill Gross started Idealab (which has launched 150 startups and counting) to “look for big problems in the world, invent technological solutions, then build companies to fix them” he was doodling designs for the solar thermal mirrors that reflect concentrated sunlight onto a solar receiver, instead of attending [...]
Why is Bill Gates backing a CSP company? What is oil major ENI doing with a CSP start-up? Why has Zurich airport agreed to purchase aviation fuel from a CSP company? Why are investors purchasing operating CSP plants? Many investors have written-off CSP in favour of investments PV and wind. [...]
The weighted average LCOE of Concentrated Solar Power plants fell by 47% between 2010 and 2019, from USD 0.346/kWh to USD 0.182/kWh, excluding two much delayed projects that are not representative of today’s optimised technology configuration that were commissioned in 2019. The global weighted-average total installed costs of Concentrating [...]
Average CSP prices to fall by a half as Chile, Dubai projects near completion. The global average cost of new CSP projects is set to plummet in 2020 and 2021, based on auction and power purchase agreement (PPA) data, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) said in its latest [...]
Renewable electricity costs have fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by improving technologies, economies of scale, increasingly competitive supply chains and growing developer experience. Since 2010, utility-scale solar PV power has shown the sharpest cost decline at 82%, followed by concentrating solar power (CSP) at 47%, onshore wind [...]
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) have developed a low cost Solar 'Parabolic Trough Collector' (PTC) system for concentrating solar energy with industrial applications in areas such as desalination, space heating and space cooling, among others. This indigenously designed and developed system was lightweight with high energy efficiency [...]
