Compared to other energy storage technologies, thermal energy storage has a huge advantage. It can be dropped-in to repurpose existing coal power plants by simply replacing the fuel, coal, with thermal energy storage to be charged with excess renewable energy from the grid, and discharged using nearly all of the [...]
Engineers at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., have identified a new approach for the storage of concentrated solar thermal energy, to reduce its cost and make it more practical for wider use. In the charging phase, heat from a CSP collector breaks down strontium carbonate into strontium oxide and [...]
The Xinhua Power Generation Company held a groundbreaking ceremony, together with Bortala Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture, celebrating the start of the firm’s 1 GW new solar energy project at Bozhou, located on the north side of G219 National Road west of Bole City at Aheqi Farm, Jinghe County in Xinjiang Province, [...]
On July 4, the Development and Reform Commission of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region issued the list of the second batch of market-based grid-connected new energy projects 2022, including a total of 67 projects. Among them, two new energy projects, including the Hami Solar (thermal) Storage Multi-energy Complementary Integrated Green Power [...]
China's energy resource endowment is dominated by coal. Along with the "double carbon" goal, the demand for low carbon energy production and consumption has become more and more urgent. In Shaanxi, for example, during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, Shaanxi Province added a total of 15.13GW of new energy installations; [...]
Advocates for Australia’s fledgling solar thermal industry argue that an appropriately designed storage incentive – either a specific target or a capacity incentive – could support the emergence of new solar thermal and long-term energy storage technologies, without propping up ageing fossil fuel generators. Director of the Australian Solar Thermal [...]
Australian concentrated solar company Vast Solar has teamed up with another local thermal storage hopeful 1414 Degrees in the latest attempt to build a large scale solar thermal and storage plan in Port August, South Australia. The Sydney-based Vast Solar will acquire 50% of the shares in Silicon Aurora, a [...]
Thermal energy storage is one of the cheapest storage options for the 100% renewable grid of the future. The costly part has been converting the heat back into electricity to return to the grid. So why not just sell the heat itself? The Breakthrough Energy Ventures-funded startup Rondo Energy proposes [...]
Concentrating solar power (CSP) has long held promise as a renewable energy technology. CSP uses mirrors, or heliostats, to harness the power of the sun by heating and storing an inexpensive medium such as sand, rocks, or molten salt for on-demand energy dispatch. To spur CSP industry advancement and achieve [...]
By producing solar hydrogen as an industrial service for copper mining, the scale is established for mass production of green hydrogen at much lower cost than electrolysis. Hybrid-Sulfur (HyS) solar reactor The fastest route to commercializing solar hydrogen could be by supplying hydrogen, oxygen and heat for Australia’s copper mining [...]
A consortium including Australian concentrated solar power company Vast Solar has filed to patent a new tank design for thermal energy storage systems. The new design, it says, substantially mitigates the risk of tank failures which have been identified as one of the key shortcomings of the economical storage technology. [...]
SENER Renewable Investments, the SENER Group subsidiary that promotes and develops highly technological renewable energy projects, has launched the first hybrid solar project in Spain that merges CSP technology with molten salt storage and photovoltaic technology. In this design, the SENER group is combining two widely known technologies for its [...]
Global solar energy supplies are growing rapidly, with nearly 10 times as much solar capacity installed today as there was a decade ago. Leading the boom is the photovoltaic (PV) panel, which converts sunlight into electricity using semiconductors. But even as the glossy rectangles become increasingly cheaper and ubiquitous, solar [...]
