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 policies to enable carbon-free energy storage technologies and, in particular, long duration energy storage, as renewable energy standards ramp up towards a [...]
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.” Aalborg CSP’s steam generation system for the 600 MW DEWA Concentrated Solar Power project in Dubai Conversion would repurpose [...]
Pumping hot molten silicon is the key to gigawatt-scale thermal storage. “This is the technological step that we made that preceded this,” said Henry. At this scale, you would need to able to pump a very large volume of very hot silicon through the enormous network of carbon graphite pipes. [...]
The Spanish government on Tuesday approved the energy storage strategy, targeting some 20 GW of storage capacity in 2030 and reaching 30 GW by 2050 from today’s 8.3 GW. Storage that is currently available in Spain comes mainly from pumped hydro and concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, to which the [...]
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 salts with their working [...]
Sustainable electricity systems need renewable and dispatchable energy sources. Solar energy is an abundant source of renewable energy globally which is, though, by nature only available during the day, and especially in clear weather conditions. We compare three technology configurations able to provide dispatchable solar power at times without sunshine: [...]
Tim Bruewer details optimal thermal management for the use of molten salt in solar thermal power plants with concentrated radiation. The demand for environmentally friendly and low-CO2 forms of energy generation has been increasing in Europe since the ‘Green Deal’ was presented by the EU Commission in 2019, defining the [...]
Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a molecule that absorbs energy from sunlight and stores it in chemical bonds. A possible long-term use of the molecule is to capture solar energy efficiently and store it for later consumption. The current results have been published in the Journal of the American [...]
Solar thermal can produce clean heat to run processes that cause a third of global carbon emissions. In this article, I argue that a $1 Trillion pot of gold may await the right solutions. Due to costs and other barriers, solar thermal's present footprint on the global energy production [...]
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. [...]
When you think about humanity’s impact on the climate, images of airplane and car exhaust fumes may spring to mind. Yet aviation and cars only account for 2% and 6% of global carbon emissions, respectively. Another sector — which hardly anyone ever talks about — has higher emissions than [...]
Global learnings on the impact of 'transient' risks on Concentrated Solar Power tower systems are driving improved storage tank piping and all-welding techniques, experts told New Energy Update. In a bid to accelerate deployment, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published June 12 the world's first best practices [...]
At the end of February, Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi outlined the company's long-term strategy for the next three decades, which set out how the business will become more sustainable and increase its focus on low carbon energy. The plan, which has a target to cut the group's absolute lifecycle emissions [...]
