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.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
The largest solar power plant of its kind is about to turn on in California's Mojave Desert.The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System will power about 140,000 homes and will be a boon to the state's renewable energy goals, but it was no slam dunk. Now, California is trying to bring conservationists and energy companies together to create a smoother path for future projects.
To get the best view of the Ivanpah solar project, you have to go up to the top of a 400-foot concrete tower. Below, close to 200,000 mirrors shimmer across a dry, dusty valley. "It's very exciting," says Dave Beaudoin, the construction manager for the $2 billion project located about an hour southwest of Las Vegas. Each mirror is about the size of a garage door, and it's mounted on a pole so it can be pointed at the tower. "We can keep the sun's energy — the rays of the sun — targeted back to the solar tower," Beaudoin says.
All of those mirrors generate about a thousand degrees of heat. It isn't the solar technology most of us think of: dark panels on rooftops. These mirrors heat a giant boiler on top of the tower, where water turns into steam. Beaudoin says that steam powers a turbine that generates electricity.
Greentech Media reports that Brightsource has needed to get some additional funding to complete the plant and is now looking to sell the technology in future rather than build projects - BrightSource Raises Another $35M for Ivanpah and CSP.
BrightSource Energy just collected $15 million of a modest $35 million tranche of venture funding. (It's modest relative to the hundreds of millions the company has raised over the last decade.) ...RenewEconomy has an article on a new mirror design that could dramatically increase the efficiency of solar thermal plants - ‘Perfect’ mirror could lead to concentrated solar breakthrough.Woolard's resignation came on the heels of a BrightSource press release that described the company "evolving from being a U.S. project developer to becoming a global technology provider that also offers development support as well as engineering and operational services." That's tough language to decode, but forgoing project development to become a "technology provider" is reminiscent of a startup's transition to a licensing model -- not always a good sign for a startup. ...
Several months ago, we reported that BrightSource's giant Ivanpah solar thermal project in the Mojave Desert was 92 percent complete. The 377-megawatt project consists of three 459-foot-tall towers encircled by arrays of garage-door-sized heliostats. A total of 173,500 computer-controlled heliostats will eventually reflect the sun onto the receiving towers, heating water to create steam that will drive turbines that produce electricity. Future projects from BrightSource will include thermal energy storage as per Solar Reserve's projects. Another CSP vendor, GlassPoint, directs its steam toward enhanced oil recovery, rather than electrical power. Two BrightSource Energy projects have recently been shelved due to permitting issues. BSE terminated power purchase agreements for the proposed Hidden Hills and Rio Mesa CSP solar power tower projects....
Former CEO Woolard said, "The problem we're trying to solve is [... how to] decarbonize the power supply and maintain system reliability at the lowest total cost to customers." Woolard noted that each picture-window-sized heliostat mirror, installed at the rate of one per minute at the $2.2 billion Ivanpah project, is capable of providing power to approximately one home, without the "hidden integration costs to the consumer" that come with wind and solar.
Since BrightSource was founded, its competition -- natural gas and solar photovoltaics -- has gone through disruptive price drops. CSP has not yet had the opportunity to scale like those two technologies.
Researchers at MIT in the US have stumbled upon a new method to trap light that could lead to a wide variety of applications, not least of all a vast improvement in the efficiency of concentrated solar power generation.The breakthrough involves what is being described as a kind of “perfect” mirror, which works in a way that deviates from known scientific laws, pitting light waves against light waves, and setting up two waves that have the same wavelength, but exactly opposite phases — where one wave has a peak, the other has a trough — so that the waves cancel each other out. Meanwhile, light of other wavelengths (or colors) can pass through freely.
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Hot on the heels of ARENA’s decision against supporting Alinta’s development of solar thermal power generation in Port Augusta, the federal government has launched an set of online tools, funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, aimed at helping researchers, developers and financiers assess the commercial prospects of Concentrating Solar Thermal power projects in Australia.Originally developed by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the concentrating solar thermal System Advisor Model (SAM) has been adapted for Australian conditions by the Australian Solar Thermal Energy Association (AUSTELA) through a $73,500 ARENA investment.
According to AUSTELA, the adapted SAM model is “general purpose and can predict hourly, monthly and annual output of CSP, Concentrating PV, flat plate PV and a range of other renewable energy systems” – but there has been an extensive body of work around its application to CSP systems in particular.
“Concentrating solar thermal systems have the potential to play a significant role in future electricity networks as they can store energy, which means clean energy can be dispatched to homes and businesses at anytime of the day or night,” said federal resources and energy minister Gary Gray.
“These new tools – which will optimise an industry-leading United States model for Australian conditions – will make it easier for developers and financiers to assess the commercial viability of concentrating solar thermal projects.”
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Kuwait recently started the bidding process for the 70 MW Shagaya Multi Technology Renewable Energy Power Park, which will include a 50 MW CSP plant with 10 hours thermal storage in addition to 10MW PV and 10MW wind. ...There is much more on Kuwait’s renewable energy agenda, however, given that the state-owned Shagaya project is the first of a three-phased master plan proposed by KISR. The second phase will expand the plant’s capacity by 930 MW to bring it up to 1,000 MW, and the third by another 1,000 MW to ultimately reach 2,000 MW by 2030. By then, the complex will generate more than 5,000,000 MWh of power every year, fulfilling the demands of nearly 100,000 households. A 100-square-kilometre (38.6 square-mile) site in Shagaya – a desert area 100km (62 miles) west of Kuwait City, near the borders with Saudi Arabia and Iraq – has been designated for the complex. And while the first phase will be financed by the government, the second and third phases are expected to be offered to investors on a Build-Operate-Transfer basis for 25 years. - See more at: http://social.csptoday.com/emerging-markets/csp-makes-grand-entry-kuwait#sthash.2JgVY40V.dpuf
Cleverly combining solar PV with solar thermal to reach 80% conversion efficiencyConcentrating the sun's ray onto solar photovoltaic (PV) modules requires walking the fine line between optimizing power output and not literally melting your very expensive super-high-efficiency solar cells. A team led by IBM Research seems to have found a way to push back the line. They have created a High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system that is capable of concentrating the power of 2,000 suns onto hundreds of triple junction photovoltaic chips measuring a single square centimeter each (they even claim to be able to keep temperatures safe up to 5,000x). The trick is that each solar PV cell is cooled using technology developed for supercomputers; microchannels inspired by blood vessels but only a few tens of micrometers in width pipe liquid coolant in and extract heat "10 times more effective than with passive air cooling."
The beauty is that this heat is not just thrown away. This system gets useful work out of it. So while the PV modules are 30%+ efficient at converting the sun's light into electricity, another 50% of the sun's energy is captured as heat and can then be used to do things like thermal water desalination and adsorption cooling. This means that the system is capable of converting around 80% of the collected solar energy into useable energy (though the electricity is of course more useful than the thermal energy).
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
The 392MW Ivanpah solar tower power station is the biggest concentrated solar thermal project in the world. It is also the most visually arresting. It features three huge towers, each 150m tall, surrounded by huge fields of mirrors that will focus the sun’s energy on a receiver located at the top of the tower. Water is boiled to create steam that then drives the turbines. It’s solar generation at a massive scale, made more impressive by its surroundings. Even though it spreads over so many hectares, its size pales against the grandeur of the stunning Mojave landscape.Ivanpah is not the only solar power station of large-scale being built in this art of the world. To the north, across the state border in Nevada, a 110MW solar tower with storage facility is being built by SolarReserve.
To the west, in the heart of California’s “high desert”, First Solar is nearing completion of a 250MW AVSR solar PV project near Lancaster, while down the road SunPower has begun construction of a 579MW solar PV plant of their own. A little further north, the tables are turned as SunPower puts the finishing touches to its 250MW CVSR project, while First Solar is about to trump it with the 550MW Topaz solar PV project, which is half way through construction.
But even as these massive projects are nearing completion, the question is being asked: Does the future of solar really lie in more of these large scale projects? Even the owners of these huge projects are not so sure.
NRG, the largest owner of generation assets in the US, and part owner of the Ivanpah project, says it is uncertain about the future of such large scale projects, because they are hugely capital-intensive. “These projects are massive, and even though the technology is proven it is very difficult to continually build these in the US, because there are limits to where these projects can be placed,” says Todd Michaels, the head of distributed generation for NRG. “Utilities are fully procured out in the south-west where this technology most appropriate. You are seeing a move to push new solar projects into distribution network. That’s where our CEO David Crane is saying these projects are heading – into distributed energy in general and solar in particular.”
CEO SunPower Tom Werner is building two of these massive projects, but even he says he is not sure where the future lies, which is why he is having his company hedge his bets. “We large scale utility, large and small distributed generation , and rooftop,” Werner told RenewEconomy is a recent interview. “We purposely straddle all three because we don’t know the answer to your question, to be honest. “Here’s how we look at it. The beauty of solar is that it is easy to site, where there is sun. It’s quick to install, scaleable, and you can make it big or small. Those are huge advantages. “So you can though utility problem on its head – you ask yourself, where do I have transmission, where do I have load, and then you can put put solar in it.
Abu Dhabi, the most oil-rich of the United Arab Emirates, is now home to the world's single-largest concentrated solar power plant. The 100-megawatt Shams 1 plant cost an estimated $750 million and is expected to provide electricity to 20,000 homes, according to the BBC.Why, you might ask? Bloomberg says the less oil Abu Dhabi uses for local consumption, the more it can export.
Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, head of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., speaking at a news conference for the plant's opening over the weekend, said it is part of a "strategic plan to diversify energy sources in Abu Dhabi." ...
Shams 1 uses 768 adjustable parabolic "trough mirrors" to focus sunlight onto a water boiler that produces steam, activates turbines and finally generates electricity, reports the website Clean Technica. The middle step in the process, it says, is to use natural gas to superheat the water.
The plant, located about 75 miles southwest of Abu Dhabi, is similar in design to Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) located in California's Mojave Desert. Although Shams 1 claims to be the single-largest plant, the nine SEGS plants taken together generate more than three times as much energy and serve more than 10 times as many households at peak output.
Saturday, 20 July 2013
Australia’s largest concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) solar power plant was officially opened today, with the Victorian energy minister joining executives from the plant’s developer, Solar Systems, to cut the ribbon on the 1.5MW demonstration facility in Mildura.The demonstration of the “dense array” solar technology of parent company Silex Systems is a fore-runner for what is expected to be a 100MW power plant, with construction slated to begin in 2014. Another 1MW demonstration plant is being built in Saudi Arabia, with hopes of further development as that country pushes into the start of a $100 billion solar spending program
The array – whose 40 CPV dishes have been feeding power into the national grid for almost a month, after their successful commissioning began in April – collects sunlight in more than 100 curved mirrors and focuses it onto ultra-high efficiency “mulit-junction” PV cells; technology originally developed by Boeing to power satellites.
Silex CEO Michael Goldsworthy says the cells currently boast efficiency rates of around 43 per cent – about double that of today’s best silicon-based cells and up to four times the efficiency of thin film solar cells – but he hopes this can be lifted to more than 50 per cent, or even 60 per cent, with further research.
The technology also uses ‘active cooling’ technology to maximise power output while minimising water consumption and prolonging the technology’s lifespan.
Last June Silex predicted that the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for its technology could fall below 10c/kWh ($100/MWh) within a few years – making it cost competitive with a range of technologies such as wind and large-scale solar PV, and below the cost of new gas- and coal-fired generation.
While PV solar in it's various forms has dominated the solar power market in recent years, it seems solar thermal power is still attracting some interest, with a Vast Solar pursuing a plant in western NSW - Plans for Forbes solar thermal project
A solar thermal project near Forbes will demonstrate how cost effective renewable energy can be once its development application is approved. Three-and-a-half thousand moving mirrors, each bigger than a plasma television, will follow the sun like a field of sunflowers. The mirrors will reflect light onto five thermal receivers sitting on towers that will heat a central steam turbine, capable of producing 1.1 megawatts of electricity.The company behind the project, Vast Solar, already has 700 mirrors and one tower at Jemalong Station. ... The company’s plan is to use a method called air condenser cooling.
Friday, 12 July 2013
I have been following the "Desertec" story for a long time; the ambitious idea of building large scale solar plants in North Africa, to produce energy to be shipped to Europe.Desertec always left me perplexed. With its huge plants and a price tag of some 400 b$, I always though that it was like trying to go from a raft to a transatlantic liner without ever having built anything in between. In short, a modern equivalent of the ill-fated "Great Eastern" transatlantic liner, built in mid 19th century and way too big for its times. So, I was not surprised to read, recently, that the project is in trouble (see also here).
Not that the basic idea of the Desertec project is wrong. Northern Africa receives plenty of sunlight and it has large, empty spaces that could be profitably used to harness this energy to produce electric power. But that wasn't enough to make such a large project economically sound. The first problem was the collapse of the prices of photovoltaic panels. That undercut the original idea of the project that was to rely on the use of solar concentrating power. Then, with such low prices, it made sense to build PV plants directly in Europe. Even for a lower solar irradiation, one would still avoid the huge costs of the infrastructure needed for bringing electric power from North Africa.
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
On Friday Climate Spectator reported that a government agency (ARENA) had withdrawn $60 million in funding for a solar thermal mirror dish project planned for Whyalla in South Australia called Solar Oasis. This project planned to employ a technology held by a small company called Wizard Power, which is now in administration.According to the government, they withdrew funding because the proponent had failed to demonstrate timely progress on a range of measures necessary for the project to proceed to construction.
The story that has run in the media to date is that government was, to a large degree, responsible for many of the delays besetting the project. And that this is yet another example of the Australian government abandoning a promising solar technology which will probably be commercialised overseas....
Still it is a tale well worth telling because it holds important lessons for Australian politicians, public servants and the energy industry. It provides an insightful example of a broader, long-running saga of failure in Australian government attempts to support renewable energy via one-off grant programs that select projects via tenders.
It is a story of:
-- Politicians seeking big bang announcements and dramatic breakthrough technologies, in defiance of decades of experience that energy technology progresses through incremental improvement;
-- Technological proponents desperate for funding who have mutated their plans and projects to fit what politicians wanted, but with little demonstrated evidence that they could deliver;
-- Risk averse bureaucrats asked to evaluate and manage projects for which they had little technical expertise and experience; and
-- Precious little in the way of on the ground changes.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
I believe that we will need great ingenuity to enable our planet to provide successfully for more than seven billion human beings, let alone the nine billion that will probably inhabit it by 2050, and I believe that information technology will make this ingenuity possible. Because of fluid marketplaces and an ever more globalized economy, nearly every important resource is becoming scarcer and more costly. Evidence of this is seen in the price not only of oil but also of aluminum, concrete, wood, water, rare-earth elements, and even common elements like copper. Everything is getting more expensive because billions of people are trying creatively to repackage and consume these materials. But there is one resource whose price has consistently has gone down: computation.The power, cost, and energy use involved in one unit of computation is declining at a more consistent, dependable rate than we have seen with any other commodity in human history. That declining cost curve must be tapped to lower energy prices—and I believe it will be. This will happen as people ask: To achieve my purpose (in designing whatever device or system), can I use more "atoms" or more "bits" (computation power)? The choice will have to be bits, because atoms are going up in price while bits are going down.
Here are a few examples. When designing a car, one can put a bit more effort into stronger, lighter-weight materials, which will increase energy efficiency but possibly drive up cost; or one can put a lot more effort into using computational power to run simulations that optimize the use of materials. Today, computational fluid dynamics allow a designer to accurately design a new shape of car, put it in a computer wind tunnel instead of a physical one, and test 1,000,000 body designs to improve fuel mileage by significant amounts. This was never before possible for those constructing vehicles.
In solar energy, large fields of mirrors or photovoltaic panels can be optimized to be lighter, more reliable, and more power-efficient by putting a $2 microprocessor in every panel. An onboard computer that lets each panel track the sun independently replaces previous systems that used more steel, bigger gears, and bigger gearboxes—basically, more materials. As little as 10 years ago, the computing power and sensors needed to build a closed-loop, sun-tracking solar panel might have cost $2,000, or more than the panel itself, and thus the system would not have been cost effective. But with computing costs coming down by a factor of 1,000 every 15 years, all kinds of new opportunities arise to improve system design.
At eSolar, one of our companies, we designed and built a utility-scale solar-thermal power plant with a huge amount of computation embedded into the field of mirrors. We reduced the size of the components, cut the installation expense, and drove the cost of the system down to nearly half what had been achieved before. This experience proved to me the feasibility of replacing atoms with bits.
The price reduction curve for computing is not over—it's continuing, and each year will open up further avenues for ingenuity. That is important because our current energy resources are not at all easy to compete with. Fuels that we dig out of the ground and burn are extremely cheap. They are, in effect, the concentrated storage of millions of years of sunlight falling on Earth. Ironically, the biggest component of energy costs is the expense of moving the fuel to consumers from where it's obtained—and transportation costs are mostly fuel, too. So we are in a kind of vicious cycle. The way to break free of fossil fuels is to introduce something new to our energy equation that isn't fuel.
I believe ingenuity in the form of information technology is the only variable that offers sufficient leverage. We need to replace a cheap, unsustainable form of energy with sustainable forms of energy that are equally cheap. The only way to compete with cheap fuels is to be more clever with computation; that is, to use as little of anything else as possible.
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Whatever anyone thinks of the technology – and no one will really know until it is deployed and operating at a commercial scale – it is clear that the Solar Oasis consortium behind the 40MW “big dish” solar thermal plant planned for Whyalla are taking an innovative approach to financing and to the energy markets in general. And energy retailers and aspiring solar developers should probably take note.
RenewEconomy caught up with Alex Braisier, the managing director of Solar Oasis, by phone on Wednesday while he was in China, where he is negotiating supply and financing deals for the project. That was our first takeaway from the chat: the $230 million project will not be financed by Australian institutions, as had been envisaged originally, even though an in-principle arrangement had been made with ANZ. Braisier says Australian institutions are too inflexible and narrow in approach.
Instead, Braisier will source equity partners and debt finance mostly from China, possibly from suppliers and other interested parties. “Working with vending project financing arrangements in China is more imaginative than going through motions with an investment bank in Australia,” he says.
(This is not surprising. The fact is that Australian institutions have no experience with such technologies and no reference points. International banks are expected to carry much of the load, and the inspiration, for the solar flagships projects. As this article points out, however, the loan guarantee program in the US has helped financiers get comfortable with the technology and bring down the cost of financing. And check out this article on Forbes, about how investors are making big money from renewables. There are lessons here for the Clean Energy Finance Corp.)
The relationship with Chinese partners and suppliers has grown since Braisier first formed a partnership with Chinese-based solar PV manufacturer SunGen, which is linked with an energy retailer in Braisier’s stable, Sanctuary Energy, supplies its PV modules (at zero upfront cost) and has taken a 26 per cent stake.
Sanctuary is a specialist in green energy retailing, and has some 20,000 customers, mostly with rooftop PV of between 1.5kW to 10kW, and solar hot water systems, with an aggregate capacity of around 30MW. It is small and also nimble: Braisier and his partners are former energy traders, and have developed a solid business playing the market, hedging with caps and derivatives, and using the natural advantage of solar that produces energy in the shoulder and high peaking periods.
This leads us to the next interesting point: the proposed PPA for the Whyalla project, which will feature 330 “big dishes” first developed by ANU and then taken up by Wizard Power. (It is solar thermal with a design change, instead of parabolic troughs or flat mirrors, or solar towers, these dishes can generate temperatures of 2000°C – more than you need unless you are trying to crack hydrogen or turn coal into liquids. So around 600°C will do for Whyalla).
Anyway, Braisier sees the solar dishes as “peaking power,” and he will treat the plant as such. He shakes his head (I presume, it was over the phone) at the reported attempts by the Solar Dawn consortium to strike a PPA of around $200/MWh, in which they were unsuccessful. Why treat solar thermal like a coal-fired power station? he asks. It should be treated like a hydro or gas-fired plant, none of which are ever built with PPAs in hand. They simply play the market and sell into the peaks, when prices jump.
“It (the PPA) will be a derivative product – it’s a peaking plant,” Braisier says. “ “It will sells caps and derivative product to help retailers manage risk. That’s what solar thermal will do.” And given that South Australia has highly volatile prices, and its big peaks coincide with hot sunny days, Braisier can be certain that the Big Dish array will be producing energy when it is most needed, and most profitable. The Solar Oasis offtake agreement will be done through Sanctuary Energy.
“I think we have a different view of the market, we don’t have 100 per cent hedges, and we can take an innovative approach,” he says. “You don’t bank a hydro plant in Australia, or even a gas plant – they are not positioned in market as base-load plants. To suggest that a solar thermal behaves and looks like a coal-fired plant is ridiculous.”
Braisier says the consortium is not planning storage, but may consider adding a small gas-boosted generator to help in firming and dispatchability into the peaks, which he says would improve the project’s IRR. It is also talking, with SunGen, about the possibility of installing a 5MW solar PV installation.
Braisier’s company is currently working with SunGen to construct several solar PV installations of between 1MW and 10MW in the Philippines, replacing diesel, which is costing up to $600/MWh or more. He says PV plants of that size can be installed for around $200/MWh.
Braisier expects the nominated $230 million cost of the project will fall too. Since the tender was first accepted in 2009, the market has changed dramatically, and the price of power blocks, for instance, was down by around 30 per cent. “Vendors are falling over themselves to provide vendor financing,” he says. “We expect a significant reduction in costs.”
Now that the funding deed has been signed, Solar Oasis will work on final design, permitting, and arranging grid connection. Construction is expected to start in May next year, with the project completed before the end of 2015. It will be interesting to see which project provides electricity to the grid first – Solar Oasis, or the 250MW Solar Dawn project in Queensland.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening.
Whether the technology will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but companies like Google, Chevron and Good Energies are investing in it, and the utilities NV Energy and Southern California Edison have signed long-term contracts to buy power from these radically different new power plants.
One crucial role of the plants will be complementing solar panels, which produce electricity directly from sunlight. When the panels ramp down at dusk or on cloudy days, the plants will crank up, drawing on the stored thermal energy.
That job will become more important if photovoltaic panels, which have plunged in price lately, become even cheaper and sprout on millions of rooftops. As the grid starts depending more heavily on solar panels or wind turbines, it will need other energy sources that can step in quickly to balance the system — preferably ones classified as renewable. …
The Energy Department seems to agree: in September it gave SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee for its project in Nevada. The plant will generate 110 megawatts at peak and store enough heat to run for eight to 10 hours when the sun is not shining. ...
Technical details of the SolarReserve and BrightSource plants vary slightly, but both will use thousands of computer-operated poster-size mirrors aiming sunlight at a tower that absorbs it as heat.
SolarReserve absorbs the heat in molten salt, which can be used immediately to boil water, generating steam that turns a conventional turbine and generator. Hot salt can also be used to retain the heat for many hours for later use. BrightSource heats water that can be used immediately as steam or to heat salt for storage.
The plants rely on salt because it can store far more heat than water can. But once molten, it must be kept that way or it will freeze to a solid in part of the plant where it will be difficult to melt again. “You’ve made a commitment to those salt molecules," said John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource.
The technology is not complicated, but the economics are.
The simplest, least expensive path for solar thermal is to turn the heat into electricity immediately. But the companies are a bit like the farmer who harvests the grain and stores it in a silo rather than shipping it straight to market on the expectation that prices will be higher later. They are betting that in revenue terms, the hour at which the energy is delivered will be more important than the amount generated.
The notion is that widespread adoption of solar panels — whether on rooftops or in giant arrays in the desert — will change the hours at which prices are highest.
Today, electricity prices usually peak in the late afternoon and evening on hot summer days. “Photovoltaic panels will do a pretty good job of chopping that peak" in the late afternoon, said Paul Denholm, a solar specialist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
In other words, the new price peak will be pushed to later in the day, to just before and after sunset, when solar photovoltaic production is small or nonexistent, he and other experts say.
Monday, 12 December 2011
It is a beguiling idea - harvest sunshine, and a little wind, from the empty deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and use it to produce clean power for the region and for Europe.
Desertec, a group based in Germany with heavyweight commercial backers including Siemens and Deutsche Bank, says the scheme would also bring the regions around the Mediterranean closer together, while providing jobs and stability for the countries in the south.
It has chosen Morocco, which is embarking on its own ambitious solar programme, for its first "reference" project - a plant meant to show that its grand vision is feasible.
Desertec expects to see the first electricity flowing through undersea cables from Morocco to Spain as early as 2014.
But its stated goal - using desert power to supply up to 100% of local needs and up to 15% of European demand by 2050 - has attracted critics who question whether such a vision is possible, or even necessary.
No-one doubts the physical potential of the desert to generate renewable power.
According to a study by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), a state agency that provided data used by Desertec, less than 1% of suitable land in the North Africa and the Middle East would be needed to cover the current electricity consumption of the region, as well as Europe.
Many countries with intense sunshine also have large tracts of uninhabited land.
But creating a power network presents a series of formidable problems, from nomads stealing solar components to the technological and political challenges of transporting and delivering electricity over such a vast area.
Paul Van Son, the Desertec Industrial Initiative's chief executive, stresses that his group has no detailed blueprint, but aims instead to create the broad conditions for a solar network to be developed.
"There is nothing which is unrealistic," he says.
"It's already happening today, there are installations in the deserts, solar installations, wind parks - it all works.
"There are electrical grids from Tunisia, Algeria for instance and Morocco to Spain and Europe. It's possible to transport electricity over long, long distances."
Desertec points to a pair of cables already installed between Morocco and Spain - though for now these are carrying power from north to south.
It says it will work closely with Medgrid, a French scheme to enable the construction of a Mediterranean transmission system.
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
BrightSource Energy said Monday that it has struck a deal to add energy storage systems to three massive solar thermal power plants it will build to supply electricity to utility Southern California Edison.
Energy storage will allow the plants to operate into the night, meaning that BrightSource can now forgo building one 200-megawatt solar station that previously was needed to meet its obligation to generate 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually for the utility.
“It’s a huge advantage,” John Woolard, BrightSource’s chief executive, said in an interview Monday. “We came out very strongly with what I believe is the largest solar storage deal in the world.”
BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs said in an e-mail that only six of the seven planned solar “power tower” stations will need to be built, saving some 1,280 acres of desert land. If approved by state regulators, the amended contracts with Southern California Edison will also result in lower costs for utility customers, the company said.
Both issues have come to the forefront as some environmentalists increasingly object to industrializing swaths of California’s Mojave Desert for solar power plants. Solar thermal developers, meanwhile, compete against ever-cheaper photovoltaic power plants as the price of solar modules continues to fall.
When four of the nine big solar thermal power plants approved by the California Energy Commission last year changed ownership, the new developers announced they would switch to solar panels like those found on residential rooftops and which convert sunlight directly into electricity.
Monday, 10 October 2011
Chevron Corp. (CVX), the second-largest U.S. oil company, began extracting crude from a southern California field using steam produced by a 29-megawatt solar- thermal power plant. BrightSource Energy Inc.’s system uses mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler at Chevron’s Coalinga, California, enhanced oil recovery project, the solar company said in a statement after extraction began today.
Solar-thermal technology companies such as BrightSource are targeting industrial users in the oil-recovery and food- processing industries as customers as well as power generation. Mining and metals processing are also very promising, especially in remote areas where power can also be generated along with heat, Charlie Ricker, BrightSource senior vice president of business development, said today in an interview. ...
The Coalinga plant consists of 3,822 mirror systems, or heliostats, each with two 10-foot (3-meter) by 7-foot mirrors mounted on a 6-foot steel pole focusing light on a 327-foot solar tower. Steam created by the heat is fed into the oil reservoir, making it easier to bring to the surface. The system began generating steam in August, Kristin Hunter, a spokeswoman for Oakland, California-based BrightSource, said today in an e- mail.
Areva SA’s Areva Solar, Seville, Spain-based Abengoa SA, Erlangen, Germany-based Solar Millennium AG (S2M) and Burbank, California-based eSolar Inc. are competing with BrightSource with their own solar-thermal technology. Glasspoint Solar Inc., based in Fremont, California, makes solar steam generators for the oil and gas industry using mirrored troughs inside of glasshouse enclosures to protect the mirrors.
Enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, fits very well with solar temperatures, Glasspoint Vice President John O’Donnell, said today in an interview.
Some 32 percent of California’s industrial and commercial gas use is for EOR as its use grows in the U.S. and all over the world, O’Donnell said. The state produces about 40% of its oil using EOR and in a few years that will grow to 60%, he said.
The company can produce heat for EOR for about $3 per million British thermal units, compared with about $4 for a comparable natural-gas plant in the U.S. and between $10 to $12 for other conventional solar thermal technologies, O’Donnell said. “We are the only ones below natural gas right now in the U.S.”
Thursday, 6 October 2011
The owners of Australia’s most polluting coal-fired power station, the Playford plant in South Australia, are considering converting it to a solar thermal facility if it is closed as part of the government’s proposed buyout of brown-coal generators.
Jeff Dimery, the head of the now privately owned Alinta, said solar thermal technology was one of two options being considered after the closure of the 240MW Playford, and may be an easier option than trying to source gas for a gas-fired peaking generator, as there is no gas pipeline to Port Augusta.
“We’re exploring the idea of building a renewable facility and integrate that with baseload (from the remaining northern station) and solar thermal would be ideal, as there a good sun resource in the region,” Dimery told Climate Spectator in an interview. “The technology requires funding, and it’s a case of needing to convince government that it is one of better projects. We intend to explore it.”
Playford is one of four brown coal generators eligible to make a tender for the government’s proposed buyout, which intends to remove 2000MW of brown coal generation from the grid by 2020 in order to reduce emissions, and create room for gas-fired generation or renewables to be built in their place.
The solar thermal idea will not form part of Playford’s submission – apparently it matters not what the owners of the retiring generation plant intend to do with the funds (and some may be expected to expatriate those funds overseas), but Dimery is confident that Playford would be an attractive option in any case. For a start, it’s the most polluting, at 1.7t of Co2e/MWh, the early closure of 240MW would have little impact on the National Energy Market, and the workforce could be absorbed at the neighbouring 520MW Northern Power Station without any forced redundancies. That could save on government funds.
The other attraction of solar thermal is that it could be integrated into the Northern Power Station, pre-heating boilers in the same way that a solar booster plant will be designed to do at the Kogan Creek power station in Queensland, and/or putting electricity directly into the grid.
