Sunday, May 26, 2013
Michael F. Hoexter, Ph.D.
March 18, 2008
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31 Comments
At the International Energy Agency's biennial SolarPACES 2008, held this year in Las Vegas, there were many signs that the sleeping solar giant of the desert, Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), is waking up.
The primary attendees and organizers of SolarPACES are scientists, engineers and industry representatives involved in either CSP electric power or the use of concentrated sunlight to generate chemical fuels. On the research side, the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories and National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), the German Aerospace Agency - DLR, and Spain's Ciemat are doing much of the heavy lifting. At the 2008 conference, there were also presentations by CSP industry representatives from Abengoa Solar, Acciona Solar, Ausra, BrightSource Energy, Iberdrola, Sener, Solar Millennium, with Nevada Power, Arizona Public Service, the Salt River Project, and Sacramento Municipal Utility District representing regional utilities.
One high point of this year's conference was a tour of Acciona Solar's recently dedicated 64-megawatt (MW) Nevada Solar One parabolic trough plant that feeds electricity to Nevada Power through a long-term power purchase agreement. A sign that the industry is coming into its own was the presence of numerous representatives of supplier industries, including glass, turbine, and aluminum manufacturers.
Most symposium topics at SolarPACES dealt with technical issues related to plant design, optics, and utilizing storage for the better studied parabolic trough plant design, of which California's long-running SEGS has been the prime example. Central receiver, parabolic dish, and Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) designs also received some attention. While commercial test beds for CSP are still limited to the few existing plants, test facilities are available at Sandia; PSA in Almeria, Spain; Odeillo in the French Pyrenees and CSIRO in Australia.
Other scientific and engineering presentations were based on simulations and analyses of sophisticated models of plant output and operating behavior. Most presentations reinforced the utility of integrating thermal storage into plant designs, with storage media molten salt, water, thermal oil, concrete, and rocks all under study or in deployment.
Besides the tour of Nevada Solar One, the conference was further energized by recent announcements of new CSP projects.
Abengoa Solar's 280 MW parabolic trough project with 6-hour molten salt storage for the investor-owned utility Arizona Public Service will be designed to supply the late afternoon and evening electric load of the Arizona summer.
Ausra has just signed a power purchase agreement with Northern California's PG&E to build the world's first CLFR plant at 177 MW in California's Central Valley.
Solel is to construct a 553 MW complex of parabolic trough power plants in the Mojave Desert to fulfill a 25-year power purchase agreement with PG&E.
BrightSource Energy plans a 400 MW power tower plant in California.
In Spain, 800 MW are online, currently under construction or planned.
The world's first commercial central receiver (power tower) plant, PS10, at 11 MW is now online near Seville. Abengoa is now constructing a larger version, called PS20.
Solar Millennium, Flagsol, Cobra S.A. and Sener S.A. are finishing work on a 50 MW parabolic trough plant called Andasol 1 in the province of Granada. It is the first commercial CSP plant with molten salt storage and is scheduled to go online later this year.
Construction has started on the almost identical Andasol 2 with plans going forward for Andasol 3 at the same location.
Solar Tres, a central receiver design based on the U.S. demonstration plant of the late 1990's, is reported to be close to obtaining financing, making it the first baseload solar power plant with round the clock power generation during the summer.
Iberdrola is building a 50 MW parabolic trough plant at Puertollano in southern Castile, with plans for others.
Outside of Spain and the U.S., there were announcements of small CSP additions to conventional fossil power plants in Algeria and Egypt as well as an experimental plant in Germany.
Many of the discussions that touched on U.S. policy focused on the uncertainty of the now endangered 30% investment tax credit (ITC), upon which all announced U.S. projects depend. Additionally, some conservationists are concerned about interference in the habitats of desert wildlife, including the Mojave ground squirrel, by large solar developments in the very favorable Western Mojave desert. There are moves to block development there that, tragically, would pit one set of environmental concerns against another. By contrast, Spanish participants were well satisfied with the current Spanish and European policy environment that is based on a feed-in tariff system; although, the CSP industry would prefer that regulators lift the 50 MW project size cap.
Michael Hoexter, Ph.D., a renewable energy and energy efficiency advocate, has helped California utilities implement and market energy and resource efficiency programs. His views on the transition to a sustainable energy economy and the valuation of energy and energy services can be found at www.greenthoughts.us.
Michael Hoexter
You begin by taking on big energy's long history of extensive lobbying that has continually prevented sensible consumer 100% buy back legislation. This is working in Germany, and will work here if environmentally concerned people like ourselves are allowed to receive the same financial incentives that companies like Bright Source receive. Of course LADWP and SCE here in CA would refuse to accept this, because any independently owned solar panel or windmill is a billboard for energy independence - their worst enemy. Just like home computers hurt the word processing business, inexpensive and profittable rooftop solar and small windmills will do the same to big energy, and they know this!
(continued.....) The homes served by Bright Source's 7,000 acre Ivanpah project could produce the same amount of energy with a 12 X 12 rooftop solar system, and prevent the deplorable ecological disaster Bright Source and its supporters find acceptable. Plus, if they could host a larger system and were allowed to sell that hot commodity "peak power" back through the grid, this would begin to make current coal and NG plants obsolete, by making one less house dependent on it, and exchanging brown electrons with green. Germany is doing it with less solar potential than us, so we can too.
We are left with a stark choice with regard to reducing our GHG emissions. Unfortunately distributed energy, which I support, is alone insufficient to reduce our GHG emissions fast enough. I am in favor of policies, like those in Germany and Spain that accelerate the development of both types of renewables: utility-scale and distributed. I do not think that we have the luxury to take sides as you folks seem to.
The projects in the desert, including at Ivanpah, have to go through a rigorous environmental review process lasting sometimes a year or more and need to mitigate any substantial concerns. To call them "ecological disasters" is to call into question the judgment of the many wildlife biologists and conservationists involved in the process. The firms involved are at the forefront of mitigating a still larger ecological disaster, one that will threaten creatures in the desert and in other ecosystems.
Salt flats mean lots of salt, think of how that would impact on steel supporting structures! (Also, when there is rain, you have an instant ecology with wildlife in a furious race to grow, eat and breed. - it maybe very rare but it happens.)
No, the big deal is the ability to store energy, in this way solar thermal actually compliments wind, rather than competes with it. It is not for nothing that major windfarm developers are now also getting involved with solar thermal.
Now is the time to stop wasting money and effort on coal, and pour it into renewables.
Indeed, these are excellent news for solar energy. In terms of solar technology I’m wondering whether Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV) could beat in few years CSP. CPV announces a generation cost target of about 10 – 15 c€/kWh by 2010. This is an ambitious target which would beat CSP generation costs (around 20 – 25 c€/kWh).
CPV Electricity generation is direct, no need of power block for Rankine cycle, no need of cooling water… Technology is modular, so power plants may range from few MW to several tens or hundreds MW. Drawback is the inability to store energy, then a worse dispatchability ratio.
@ Andrew Woodroffe : we need to launch a general reflection on what reserve capacity is required for further renewables penetration in all our countries. The cost of spare capacity should be internalized, so as to make a global assessment on renewables investment and generation cost, providing as well good schemes to promote further renewables penetration. In the future it will be needed to offer renewable energy sources together with spare capacity (thermal, chemical, mechanical or electrical storage, auxiliary power unit…), so as to guarantee a dispatchability ratio acceptable by TSO.
Update:
The figure for Spain is 800 MW already in the ground or under construction while it is around 2000 MW including planned installations
CPV is a promising technology that may help follow the load and may become more useful with cheaper electric energy storage.
Stop Killin,
Distributed energy is good too though I believe you are wanting renewable energy to mean more than what it is...you have a large social agenda that goes beyond the technology itself. If you care about global warming, which is really going to kill a lot of wilderness and really bake the deserts, these plants are some of our best hopes because of the way they can store and dispatch power. They don't cover much ground: only a minute fraction of the desert will generate most of the power we use. Though it is slightly more expensive, they also can be cooled with minimal water.
"Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy"
Any thoughts on how you are actually going to phase out coal or natural gas power plants in the next decade or so? The landscape you claim to care about is going to be permanently disfigured by their emissions, baking existing plant and animal life.
John,
Solar or any renewable resource gets more expensive the lower the strength of the renewable resource. So it is a matter of how much money you are willing to spend on clean power for what end.
Fossil fuel has to be used for RE... Otherwise there is no hope whatsoever! Only about a century ago, humanity had to use steam engines and horses to kick start the oil revolution Along with government help! If you believe that RE is too diffuse, make a "solar printer", a "battery printer" and cover the entire desert! I would rather pay more than see the world go through yet another dark age complete with GW! And if it is deemed "impossible", then simply go nuclear altheway (they could always boost the space program by shipping the RECYCLED WASTE to an appropiate orbit with all the excess power available via electromag launch tubes and ablative layers).
Anything's possible... even self initiated doomsdays!
Isn't the Enviroment a renewable resource?
None of the structures intended for solar electorical production would last very long without human activity to maintain them. It might take 1 or 2 hundred years, but the enviroment would tear down this facility or even Las Vegas in a very short period of time. By the way, 200 years in almost nothing in terms of the Earth.
As such the Enviroment is a renewable resource that can be used just like river water and solar energy.
CSP
CSP is what you see, its solar concentration,
By several means it takes and gleans, light wave manipulation,
It seems just right with high sun light for junction applications,
Brings down the price it's very nice for solar installations.
adrianakau2aol.com
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July 3, 2008
You're just another propagandist, lying and making broadly untrue and unnecissarily generelized statements. I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're only making energy problems worse, not any more responsible. Get a rational academic mindset or stop posting on the blogosphere.