Solar Power at Night using Concentrated Solar Power CSP
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
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Concentrated solar power or CSP uses mirrors (heliostats) to focus sunlight to heat up a solar receiver and heat fluid (usually molten salt storage) that can be stored for later. It has been around for literally thousands of years, but is still a hot new technology for the energy transition. In this video, I'm going talk about how CSP works and the different technology options: power tower, parabolic trough, Fresnel reflector and dish. We’re going to look at how it is different from solar photovoltaics with or without batteries, plus I'll explain why I think CSP's time to shine might have arrived. Spoiler alert, it's not about generation, it's because of cheap long duration energy storage.
Thanks to Keith Lovegrove from ITP for sharing his extensive CSP knowledge and CSP facility video footage with me. You can get in touch with Keith through ITP: itpthermal.com/
If you've got questions or want to learn more about CSP then join Keith and I in a livestream coming up on April 4 (Australia time): ua-cam.com/users/liveGuw1IMrU-qY
Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
00:46 History of Concentrated Solar Power
03:12 The Different Types of CSP Systems
06:10 Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video!
07:07 CSP vs PV
09:12 What about CSP vs PV + Battery?
10:09 CSP as Long Duration Storage
13:39 The Scale of CSP Systems
14:16 So why isn’t CSP more popular?
15:41 Outro
Sources:
X&Y Partners - Cannibalization in Renewable Energies
thisisxy.com/blog/cannibaliza...
Phoumin et al - Potential Renewable Hydrogen from Curtailed Electricity to Decarbonize ASEAN’s Emissions: Policy Implications
www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/...
The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer
Kevin Irman: research, calculations, assistant editor
Javi Diez: editor www.linkedin.com/in/javierdie...
If you would like to help develop the Engineering with Rosie channel, you could consider joining the Patreon community, where there is a chat community (and Patreon-only Discord server) about topics covered in the videos and suggestions for future videos and production quality improvements. / engineeringwithrosie
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This video was sponsored by Brilliant - Наука та технологія
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Rosie you’re a superstar.
The more intelligent, articulate and likeable people like you explain the transition to a greener way of living the quicker we’ll get there with EVERYONE on board.
The change is exciting, it’s full of opportunities and your way is so beneficial.
Thank you
🤩
You really are awesome, one of the only UA-camrs I share with other people. Your vid’s are so insightful! Keep being awesome! Be well.
Have you heard about the hundreds of Spanish investors lost billions on these kind of power stations? Have you heard what happens when there are a few rare cool days in a row and the salt hardens and clogs all the pipes?
@@Deontjie If the project was launched before the marked was ready, then the investment can be lost. If there is ANY risk of cold days, one would need a backup system to avoid cloging of the pipes. There is always a risk element in investments. 9 out of 10 investments could be a loss. I thought that CSP was an obsolete tech, but Rosie just pointet out, that there could be a marked in the future.
Very well said tytyty
South Africa has a couple of CSP plants coming soon. Will be interesting to see how it takes on, seems to be a good move by the Government.
I'm so glad to see your video on CSP. I love the historical research that you did. I can definitely add some of this to my CSP talk in my alternate sources of energy portion of my climate change lessons for my physics classes. Great job. Thanks
Oh that's great to hear, thanks!
CSP is a dead end. It's too expensive. It's too maintenance heavy. You have to wash these things nearly every day. The upfront costs are enormous. You can do the same thing with conventional panels and use the electricity to heat up a salt. It's less efficient, but it's cheaper. All of these mirrors need to track the sun. It does not work at all if you are off even by a little bit. It doesn't work with clouds either. Who knows what evil partial cloudy conditions cause. Having the same pipe be hundreds of degrees difference in temperature a few feet apart is not good for the pipe.
Marina make sure you don't teach the kids global warming activists stuff. There's no climate emergency.
Be sure to mention an electric heater can be added to basically turn the storage tanks also into multifunctional cheap grid batteries.
@@massatube Would describing fossil fuel caused global warming as a slowmo extinction-level threat be more your thing?
I made a death Ray in early 2000s 😂 used an old sky satellite dish and a mirror cut into squares! Managed to melt aluminium and cook some meat!
I only burnt wood while tinkering at ADFA, but you've now inspired me to graduate to barbecue level. 😂
Some 40 years ago I was shown a CSP power plant in some remote West Australian town. It worked, kinda. the guide explained that they had to spend a lot more time on maintenance than expected. Mostly cleaning the mirrors.
Wow, hats off to you for a fantastic concise and well structured script, makes it all so easy to retain. Will check out those references too, thanks so much.
With the gradual rise of sodium and flow batteries, I think storing energy from solar PV will only get cheaper. CSP will continue to struggle to beat PV in terms of cost.
What an incredible summary. Thank you Rosie.
Great video as always!
I think there might be another potential advantage to CSP: we never have to worry about curtailment of PV and wind anymore! In theory, surplus renewable electricity (if all the batteries are already full) could be dumped in resistors to further heat the thermal storage of the CSP plants. The round-trip efficiency is low, about 40%, but that's actually still higher than the round-trip of hydrogen, and much much cheaper.
That's all well and good in theory, however the problem with that is importing from the grid incurs network transmission charges, typically in the ballpark of $45-$50/MWh. That might not sound like much, but when you're dealing in a margin's game, that is a pretty steep price to pay before you even consider the cost of the electricity and all of the mandatory LGC charges. Before you know it you are breaching the $80/MWh mark, just to heat salt. The major problem is that the round trip efficiency is pretty low. Even the best plants would struggle to get anything more than 40% efficiency, so you're effectively paying $200/MWh for that electricity and the transmission company is making profit on both the inward and outward electricity flow. You'd need prices to swing a lot to recover that expense.
You are far better applying storage at the point of generation than using the grid as a conduit. There are many commercial and near-commercial technologies that are more suited to that type of storage/demand management.
The issue of overproduction isn't just a problem of shunting power to a sink, it is also an issue of shunting power through a large enough medium to get to that sink. The nice thing about batteries or gravity blocks is that you can house them on-site to have a local power sink to shunt excess power to. When you need to shunt it through the grid to a centralized sink, then you have rate charges to pay for the upgrades needed by the grid to handle it.
In the case of using a CSP's moltan salt heater to dump heat into, then it means that they need to build in extra capacity to store that heat. The problem though is that if the salts cool down too much, then they solidify which is a whole other issue to contend with. So then you need to build in over-capacity at your CSP plant, while also not having so much over capacity that on a really cloudy rainy day you don't need a ton of coal power to keep your salts warm. As with all things renewable... its always complicated. Worth doing, but complicated.
@@CaedenV The problem of solidifying salts is probably a non issue as you can design tiered storage with heat exchangers that can be mechanically uncoupled when the extra thermal mass would be a liability.
And before the Bond villain there was a Thunderbirds episode where there was a mirror supplying energy for a village but the mirror tower toppled over (earthquake maybe?) so the sun's rays were concentrated on the village. Of course they didn't allow for the sun moving but hey it was a kids show in the 60s!
Fantastic video, was wondering what happen to all those CSP projects I saw in the past, glad to hear all that positive reporting was just blowing steam 😉
Brilliant video Rosie! My reference now for helping it explain to anyone.
Thanks Rosie!
Electric cars will be very common in a few years.
At around maybe 60kwh storage each, that's big power.
Thanks for the serious coverage of this interesting topic
Another fantastically informative and interesting video from Rosie!! Thanks for the education!!
Quite a few years ago, I visited White Cliffs in western NSW and visited the local thermal solar plant.
I'm not sure where my photos are, but Wikipedia lists it as the world's first commercial solar plant.
CSP can provide process heat for industry as well. This is already being done in Germany.
yes you are right.
Let me say that we can import as many vehicles from overseas as we need, overseas supply is unaffected by our small market and its demand.
For the Australian market any demand could be met.
I suggest that V2G be a priority as it puts the maximum amount of batteries into the grid and every building is a connection to the grid.
Not rapid charging connections but daily steady top up or grid feed in.
Rapid charging will be at the corner shops as a side business and on the main roads.
Basically every EV is fully charged or ready with its next day's power needs.
The old days of going to fill up with 100kg of inflammable petroleum when the tank is empty will be seen as like we look at the horse and cart days.
The big business will be with the grid owners and the auto manufacturers.
Every building will feed in to the grid and the 20million Australian EV batteries will absorb the excess and stabilise the grid
20million buildings = 660gWh daily
20million EV 100kwh batteries = 2,000 gWh DISPATCHABLE, dispatchable storage.
Fossil fueled generation is 400gWh avg
Peaking at 600gWh if you are lucky.
Grid capacity expansion is the killer cost for central generation Renewables or nuclear.
And nuclear will tell you that is the killer cost of new Snowy 2 and Renewables.
But 5fold increase in electricity generation and the transmission is the killer of centralised any generation.
Vehicle to grid is not a viable utility-scale energy storage mechanism. The biggest problem is that the vast majority of car usage is during the day, meaning cars are not on their chargers when renewable energy generation is most abundant. The other big reasons aren't technical; they're political and legal, like the administrative cost of renting battery storage from retail consumers, legal liability in the case of damage, compensation for the degradation of the vehicle's battery, managing customer's relationships and experience etc.
Utilities would MUCH rather write one check to buy their own energy storage they own/operate than try to pay thousands of individual people to always have their cars plugged in at the right time.
@Jared S horse meat was cheap and available after the T model Ford rolled of the production line.
Horse and cart thinking is dangerous.
If you start in the wrong direction, you may never get there.
300million vehicles in the USA.
20million vehicles in Australia.
If all EV, then the energy storage capacity is 3 times the daily fossil fueled generated electricity.
This is a stupendously large amount of dispatchable electricity that the power generators do not want to compete against.
The grid owners will love to manage this cheap daily supply.
Most vehicles drive building to building.
All buildings are connected to the national grid.
Most vehicles are parked 23hrs a day.
Ezi pezi for a selfparking EV to connect to the grid like a home robotic vacuum cleaner can do.
Everything else is simple.
The grid knows you.
The grid will know you own the EV.
The grid knows how much feed in your roof top solar power system supplies.
This is baby simple, do the maths.
The money will be in the grid ownership.
The auto manufacturers know this double benefit.
The battery developers know that cheaper and bigger is on the way.
The grid builders know how massive the construction costs are to fattening the grid capacity and that it is a dead end.
I am trying to help you.
I am a Construction Engineer and have worked in power supply, and I know the numbers.
Very interesting and compelling points. 👍👍👍
you do an amazing job explaining these sorts of things. thankyou!!!
Another great video! Thanks a lot for your work
Fascinating. Love your videos.
awesome !! pumped hydro used to be my favorite, but better thermal storage seems to be coming up.
Some pretty powerful arguments for CSP...I buy it!
I watch a lot of engineering stuff on UA-cam and I really wonder, why your channel was never recommended to me until now.
Anyways, great I've found you!
Good video. I had largely written off CSP mainly due to it's higher LCOE, but as you pointed out the storage angle may make it much more competitive. It would be interesting to see how the cost compares with long range transmission.
Thank you Rosie. Your research into the history of CSP is wonderful, it adds a great deal of perspective. As you point out, future grid reliability will require multiple types of storage. CSP does offer additional flexibility because with a thermal storage/turbine combination you can move that stored energy to other storage (battery, pumped hydro etc,) and though efficiency is lost to some extent it adds an additional option that grid operators should see as a real positive.
BTW, I shared one of your recent videos to FB with the comment that you were my favorite Australian engineer. Just to let you know, that still holds. (To be honest N=1, but we could add a few and it would hold. 😛)
There is more than one engineer in Australia, so I hope if you meet another one I will still maintain your number one spot!
Another great video!
Great video Rosie, TY.
Thanks!
Interesting overview of CSP plants. I had thought CSP had turned out to be uncompetitive however you raise a good point about storage being cheap using CSPs.
Great channel. A lot of your footage is from Noor II & Noor III. After working directly at the site, I have to say the parabolic seems more workable. The solar tower seems like a great idea, until commissioning all those mirrors to move correectly. This is something that can be overcome with quality design and control. One thing that remains problematic, that is the amount of water required to clean the mirrors. The footprint for a 150MW turbine is very big, which in the dessert is not so bad until a day of wind and dust puts the mirrors out of order. A literal fleet of diesel water trucks is used to overcome this problem.
Pumped hydro is much more proven at scale.
I wouldn't have guessed that the vid would come with a cool history lesson!
Concerning 4:30 and the rationale behind the Fresnel trough, I came on a youtube video about the launching of the experimental Évora Molten Salt Platform where they managed to use molten salts in a parabolic trough system (and they of course boast that this achievement would enable a higher operating temperature as you already indicate as one of the advantages in your video). My impression of the CSP landscape is that the parabolic trough is maturing faster than the tower system (e.g. for equal land areas, the generated power seems to be higher and the project cost lower). The rationale for not yet giving up on the tower seems to come from a market of high temperature industrial heat (companies like heliogen try to make towers which heat > 1000°C).
There are also thermal storage bricks for heat storage and iron/air batteries.
Awesome need more of these and related solutions. Love it
Tanks for your summary of the various forms of CSP and the comparisons with other power sources. You could have provided some examples of the problems CSP has encountered that were not originally anticipated. This has been especially true for the tower mounted receiver type units.
You could have included the story of the large Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project that has sat idle for many years due to numerous factors.
and how Solar Reserve went bust because of technology failures... breaking many hearts in the rapid decarbonisation transition world.
Or you could do those things yourself. This video gave me precisely the information I was looking for.
very interesting , thank you 👊
Thank you for featuring our installation footage of Fresnel Collectors in your great video, Rosie. Well-researched and informative! Though we realize our projects to provide heat, steam, and cooling for industrial companies (so they are smaller in size compared to some of these enormous power plants), every step away from fossil fuels counts!
☝👍
Excellent video!
Thank you.
It would be nice if we could dispense with the steam part of the process.
CSIRO Newcastle CSP project actually holds the world record for the highest steam temperature generation from CSP
Thanks Rosie 👍
Thank you.
I think Rosie is 'almost' painting a rosie picture about CSP but anyway, i am gonna believe it :)
Minus CSP u cant go fully renewable.
Solar +onshore wind+offshore wind +psp +convwntial hydro you can reach only upto 65 to 70%
For rest u need CSP or nuclear.
While on a work trip I stopped by gemasolar in Spain it was a research station with all different experiments, why direct mirror on the side of a solar panels are discarded, and why polar mount tracker are discarded, gemasolar had those experiment and two CSP
dear Rossie, have a look at Raygen which is an Australian company and has built 4mw pilot plant in Victoria. It is cross between PV and solar thermal.
It could be interesting to hear about the potential in combining PW with the heat storage part in CSP as a battery alternative.
3 years to build a CSP plant is shorter than I thought it would be.
Stored for days? That's cool!
Would be interesting to know where CSP is possible/financially viable geographically. I.e., whether other parts of Europe will build their own plants or lots of HVDC transmission lines from the Iberian peninsula. The latter would certainly be a better alternative to buying oil and gas from "questionable" sources.
In America, Ivanpah is somewhat a "Ideal" location to install a CSP. It is near I-15 and the California / Nevada state border, about 2 miles to the northwest of I 15, so you can see it from the freeway, but it will not blind the drivers. It looks like a very bright LED light at the top of a tall tower from the freeway.
The problem is not the 4,000 acres of glass, or the amount of maintenance that the mirrors might require to keep them clean enough and pointed in the right direction. The $2,2 Billion cost is what matters, and the 400 MW of power output. So that works out to about $5.50 per rated watt, or 5 times what a normal PV solar system costs. And you must have steam engineers on site while the 800 + PSI steam generator is running. You could install a 2,200 MW solar PV system for about the same cost. And it might be smaller footprint too!
Thanks
CSP should be part of the future city planning, instead of leaving most of the rooftops unused it could be used with the tower concept to concentrate heat there and use it in various possible ways:
1. Energy storage
2. Electrity generation
3. Heating
4. Hydrogen generation (Hydrosol)
This way a more decentralized way of providing energy can be achieved on a community level.
I know you are saying there isn't that many CSP stations at the moment but I thought there was far less and thought it was just a struggling technology. Think that's just because I saw a few people post links to articles saying that.
So it's quite exciting to hear there's quite a few commercial plants and it looks like there's going to me loads more in the future.
I'm a bit of a stirling engine fan, so I always thought the dish arrangement was best. And I suppose there could be situations where that would make the most sense.
But Australia should absolutely be constructing large CSP farms with storage!
Great video, thanks Rosie. Could you address the problems that shutdown the Nevada CSP.
SO thats what it is!! In the US, between the drive from Los angeles and Las Vegas is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility!!! (I always thought it looked like heat death ray! haha)
8:48 All of this is possible with PV. You just use the electricity to heat the salt. Though PV is less efficient than CSP, the electric heaters are near 100% efficient (there would be slight losses in the line). You eliminate most of the maintenance as well. While both benefit from being clean, CSP is much more susceptible to dirty mirrors. CSP doesn't create any power without a clear sky. Any mirror not directly looking at a clear view of the sun will have its power drop to near zero.
Very good video, as always. Your content is well thought out and very clearly presented, with excellent production value. I think your enthusiasm for CSP is misplaced, though. The only reason the plant in California is still operating, and I suspect the same is true of those in Spain, is that they were provisioned largely through government funding, and neither grid is robust enough to withstand the loss of generation they provide. CSP has proven to be too costly, in terms of maintenance. This technology will continue to be a fringe solution and will be obviated entirely when hydrogen sequestration becomes more economically viable. The boring of geothermal wells using plasma lasers, something I believe you covered a while back, should offer all of the same advantages, with a much smaller footprint and far better LCOE.
I love CSP
AFAIK, dish systems are rather solar stirling dishes, with a stirling engine driving the generator, instead of steam engines/turbines.
However, they don't provide heat energy storage, electricity production follows direct irradiation, similar to much cheaper photovoltaics.
And photovoltaics can make use of diffused light (cloudy sky) too.
sorry but I was a huge fan of solar-CST and one of the main proponents went bust because of technological failures, it's not a "lack of need for the technology" that deployment of power-tower CST. The projects in the Middle East were all parabolic mirror projects. They had a contract at Port Augusta signed with the SA Government and never broke soil on that. Perhaps the molten silicon designs of 1414 (who now have a lease on the land that Solar Reserve were going to use at Port Augusta). Prof. Lovegrove is a legend, I'm sure he'll have a lot to say!
You're comparing the storage of this to lithium batteries, but there are other types of batteries like the flow batteries. So how does the storage in these CSP compare to other types of batteries like flow batteries for a couple of days of storage?
Have you heard of solar chimney power plant? I always thought this was a lower tech solution but not sure if anybody is pursuing the tech. I also read a while back they thought of using the waste heat from a coal plant for it.
Now you are talking Rosie.
The Australian electricity grid is massive and dispersed like Renewables energy..
Water usage in the steam turbines is a potential issue in dry and desert areas.
I recall some years ago CSIRO were looking at experimenting with a jet engine (without fuel) at the power tower receiver to attempt to create a way to generate electricity without the high water usage. Never heard how these experiments panned out however.
It might be possible to use captured CO2 to drive the turbines. I believe, I have read in the past that there has been some work on turbines that run on CO2 with the prospect of using them in geothermal plants.
I loved this video! I would be quite curious why sterling engines never took off for this type of grid scale use. I'm sure there is a reason there are many clever people who have thought of it first but I would love to know why it never took the steam turbines job.
Thanks Rosie, love the videos as always!
while Stirling engines are more efficient, they're also much bigger and need much more maintenance than gas or steam turbines. I think the fuel cost vs capital and maintenance cost just doesn't work out in favor of sterling engines for power generation.
Ivanpah cost $2,200,000,000 for a 400 MW CSP tower system, with 4,000 acres of mirrors. And you must have a staff person on duty each hour that the steam plant is running. So that is about $5.5 per rated watt, while a conventional PV solar system will only cost about $1 per rated watt.
So if you have $2.2 Billion to spend, would you recommend a 2,200 MW solar PV system, with almost no need for maintenance, or install another 400 MW Ivanpah system where you must hire staff to monitor the steam turbine and boiler system. At least 20 employees who will want to earn about $45,000 - $75,000 a year.
Sweden developed a submarine with a Stirling engine because it can work so silently. Military technology seems always to come first, before civilian!
Only problem I see with CSP is that batteries for grid storage are becoming cheaper and better so will it be cost effective against classical solar combined with Na-Ion or some flow batteries in 3 years time ?
This is the gamble. By the time CSP is really ready for mainstream will cheap new battery tech undermine it? I think it comes down to CSP being able to have a very large amount of storage for very low cost. The power of the input array and the turbine system ate the main costs. So you have low power high capacity. It's very suitable for backup power generation to cover a few days of no wind, but batteries to store enough to cover that would cost an absolute fortune, even with cheaper tech than today.
Rosa, desde Venezuela. Te felicito, tu trabajo es exelente, que te parece si la columna receptora de luz o de calor es también columna de un aerogenerador y esa misma también recubierta por paneles solares? Y además los espejos puedan tener un ducto de aceite caliente que tenga la función de precalentar otro silo con sales fundidas?
Thanks Rosie, well done. Could you do similar explainer than for Geothermal. I don't understand why it remains so low on research funding in Australia.
Excellent video as always!. When I was living in Australis 20 years ago, there were talks of building a solar tower in the desert. Are solar towers still relevant?
Also it would be interesting with a video about subsurface hydro storage like Quidnet energy's technology.
The ABC has a recent article on CSP.
Very interesting video - and it raises so many questions so glad there’s a follow-up livestream planned! Questions: What is the comparative power generation per square metre (or hectare…) for CSP vs PV? What is the cost/MWh of CSP storage vs Lithium or other batteries (like Redox flow), can the latter even scale? How long term is CSP storage - my guess is after a week the losses become uneconomic so probably more suitable for diurnal cycling? Finally - a key advantage of PV is that it is completely incremental, from a panel on top of a shed with an old battery up to grid scale and use of V2G storage, whereas CSP is big project stuff - beloved of utilities etc.
I've added these to the list, I'm sure we'll get to at least a couple of them! p.s. I have a hybrid flow battery project tour video coming up soon.
@@EngineeringwithRosie In the US, I'm skeptical of running long transmission lines from the CSP plant to elsewhere. There are permitting and NIMBY issues. If they close down coal plants, the lines are already permitted. It would be easier to replace these with renewables (wind or PV), or a storage site. I'm not sure how well CSP would scale in most geographical situations.
It's the same as with other types of power plants.@@mintakan003
Engineering with Rose Coloured Glasses. Suggest you have a close look at the failures of Crescent Dunes and Ivanpah CSP plants or the large plant in Spain which was closed down as soon as government subsidies were ceased. It's not just a case of installing a a plant BUT successfully operating such a plant in a cost effective way to maybe even given even a modest return on capital. Doesn't appear to be happening yet with many disappointed expectant consumers. Let's not worry about the impact of CSP on birds especially raptors. This series is more of would, coulda, shoulda, maybe, possibly etc etc.
Good and thorough content. Looks like loads of work to prepare. Nice to watch.
Now I am even more bumped that I live in the northern country with lots of clouds! My solution for now, for using close to net zero-emission heating, are wooden pellets. But I have little ideas on how to get renewable electricity efficiently. Winds are wimpy, flat lands around negate hydro. I guess PVs are the only solution for now, though I need them like 3 times as many as in Australia, due to the weather. And event then one third of the year they produce close to nothing (due to snow, low Sun's altitude and thick clouds). I guess the only option for low CO2 is nuclear in some parts of the world... And in the future, supplemented with hydrogen imported from sunnier places.
Aren’t most of the CSP projects in mothballs due to high running costs and far more competitive alternatives?
Thermal storage is a good idea, particularly where the waste heat from electricity generation can also be used, which will be close to cities with district heating systems. Does any CSP plant make use of the waste heat?
Industry needs heat more than electricity so it is ideal for industrial processes. Having heat available after dark is needed as industry runs all day not just when the sun is shining. So, CSP can do both, electricity plus heat around the clock. The tower CSP can provide the very high temperatures that the channel/trough can't.
Great vid & info on the pro’s & con’s of CSP Rosie, but I am not sold on it, I think CSP has too many problems, maintenance issues, & costs, etc, for it to be competitive with other technologies for storage & energy creation. While CSP is a very interesting technology, it still has a lot of issues & I think I would like to see more efforts go into other storage & Geothermal technology solutions, I’m sure Australia has huge potential for Geothermal power creation. Cheers
Rosie, we have a patented CSP technology that increases CSP effciency considerably .. Would love to share with you given your enthusiasm. Guy
I was hoping to find more details about the CSP installation at Port Augusta.
To the best of my knowledge it desalinates water for a large scale hydroponic greenhouse. I've passed the site a few times when crossing the country. On one trip it was during a sandstorm which stretched at least to Ceduna. The CSP plant looked quite surreal through the gloom.
CSP is a difficult technology, molten salt is a temperamental material with nasty expansion characteristics. Severe damage to the hardware during the melt / freeze phase change cycle can be a real problem.
Cold source in desert areas is its own issue. When I visited Solar One Nevada parabolic trough installation in 2014 the generation plant utilised air cooling and masses of fans.
Deep space as a cold source seems to have potential and there is some interesting citizen science on UA-cam regarding Barium Sulphate nano particles as the heat rejection medium.
Wind, PV, storage are all strong established competitors, interesting times ahead.
CSIRO were working in silicon metal as a heat storage medium.
Some people have build low temp systems, storing hot water in arge insulated tanks, to heat their Earthship in the winter, often with great results. Even if you have to use fuels say 20% of the time, that's still a big savings. Also, in some places, Coal or Gas plants could be converted to multi energy, steam is steam.
Hi Rosie, what are your thoughts on liquid air batteries.
Do you have any data on CSP desalination + water/vapor transfer/pumping?
I use CSP trough to pump water to the higher elevation storage for later gravity fed residential use. I am able to distill (although primary function was to pump) significant volume of water on sunny day reducing need for RO filtration. This is all based on small DIY - semi-off-grid setup but I believe could be easily scaled up and used in arid/semiarid location.
I'm really interested in it's potential use in industrial heat which I've yet to hear much about to my puzzlement.
Great video. For sunny places such as Australia and California this sounds great.
For Northern Europe which in winter sometimes does get much wind or solar for a few weeks at a time, probably nuclear is the way to go.
This would be great for Northern Europe in summer where in some places the sun doesn't set at all.
In Germany there is a small CSP plant in Jülich and even there it works very nicely. It reaches temperatures of 800°C which means it can also be used to produce hydrogen as a byproduct using the method in the Hydrosol project.
Nuclear is not feasible anymore for various reasons:
* way too expensive to build without government support
* way too long construction
* way too complicated construction, missing know how, see France!
* nuclear fuel supply uncertain, market dominated by Russia
* nuclear fuel rod supply uncertain, market dominated by Russia, see France!
* cooling uncertain due to drought in Europe, see France!
* turbine operation uncertain due to drought in Europe, see France!
* too inflexible, nuclear powerplant cannot simply be switched on or off depending on demand, this takes months
* way too expensive deconstruction
* way too long deconstruction
* high safety regulations -> higher costs
* requires very special location
With these reasons very few companies are willing to build and operate a nuclear power plant nowadays.
Are you going to talk about The company heliogen? It solved the problem of high cost of mirrors!
The problem now for csp is not the cost of the mirrors but the tower because no one solved the high cost of building the tower, energy storage and maintain it.
Even as storage, CSP will soon be dead in water as well, as long-term renewable energy storage will soon rely on “freeze-thaw molten salt battery for seasonal storage”. Look it up. So solar PV generation coupled with this type of storage will win over CSP in the end.
Arizona has the Solana project. It takes 3 sq miles of solar to power 70,000 homes. That works out to about 5300 sq miles of desert to handle all us households, or 20% of Arizona. Interesting
The focus of solar light on a material is limited by the melting point of the material. The higher the temperature, the higher the efficiency of the heat engine can be. If the light is focused on a plasma, there is no temperature limit. A gas turbine spins the air in a compressor. If there is a high voltage arc going through the spinning compressed air, it would make a disk of plasma. A plasma tends to absorb all manner of radiation. If the concentrated solar is focused onto a plasma disk, it would heat up the plasma. If some of the light goes through the disk, another disk or a number of disks might absorb most of the light.
Now here is a thought, some people are suggesting that electricity companies may soon resort to paying businesses to run their most electrical demanding process during the middle of the the day to soak up the excess solar power in the grid. CSP plants could take advantage of this by installing larger molten salt tanks than would otherwise be used for the size of their plant and use excess solar from the grid to heat the salts directly. Thereby having lower levelized cost of energy
Moroco one is awesome
Hi Rosie, Thank you for your informative UA-cam channel. I believe you do some consultant work. Would you consider dropping into the Mittagong area Hill Top to be exact, Im interested in getting your advice RE Sunovate, solar and if vertical axis turbine could be used at my place. Thanks again.
All the best
Chris Patterson
Sure all generators are "almost always available" but some are more so than others solar thermal has about a 20% capacity factor (amount of time it's out puting it's full name plate capacity) vs 25% PV and 30% wind on average. But nuclear sits up top with an average of 92% capacity factor.
So that means that even with thermal storage you would need ~5x the name plate capacity to match the power made by a nuclear power plant. This also doesn't take into account the winter months generating around 1/3 less solar energy on average.
I have watched CSP for decades and have built small home sized systems.
Other benefits not pointed out is that it requires highly available, inexpensive materials, and no rare minerals.
Other disadvantages not pointed out includes burn risks to people and animals around the concentrators.
It's not clear how CSP has significantly changed other than costs have been dropping due to scale. They are still complex systems.
The last decade has seen both simple PV and Li-ion battery technology costs drop dramatically, essentially wiping out most of CSP advantages.
Will continue to watch this technology evolve, but I just don't see it ever beating Wind, Solar PV and Batteries. Incredibly simple, safe, and low maintenance solutions.
That said, I would love to be pleasantly surprised.
Let the markets decide!
I wonder how sodium batteries will affect the storage cost of PV? It is an ideal use case for them.
What about the Port Augusta plant? Could that come again?
I remember seeing a company offering the style of system at an energy show in the UK 20 years ago, was surprised to didn’t seem to gain any commercial traction. And when it comes to steam generation it has always seemed strange that nobody uses refrigerant with a lower boiling point to generate electricity from low grade waste heat sources (I’m sure there must be a very good reason!)
If you had a liquid with a significantly lower boiling point that would defeat the purpose of using solar thermal. How do you keep the liquid cool and cool it down again? Water is cheap, plentiful and condenses back to water at atmospheric temperatures. It's also relatively non corrosive (which is one of the issues with CSP - the molten salt is highly corrosive). You could use supercritical C02 instead of molten salt but the fluid temperature is not quite high enough to be efficient with CST. However they are looking at blends to raise the temperature closer to 700 deg C, where you heat and pressurise CO2 directly and then use it to directly power a steam turbine when it phase changes back to a gas but once again corrosion is a major issue. A supercritical CO2 turbine is 50% efficient at converting heat to electricity compared to 35% for a steam turbine. Plus you're talking about a single process rather than heating up molten salt and then using molten salt to heat water.
There are "organic rankine cycle" heat engines. I don't know what they use, exactly.
You can also use water/steam at room temperature, you just need a colder condenser and an air- free steam circuit. It wont be too efficient though, due to carnot's law. And it will only generate low pressure (less than 1 bar- i'll guess even less than a quarter bar), so your engine would be huge.
Concerning refrigerants:
In my experience, the people working with them don't care about leaks as much as they could. So i hope they don't get used in even more applications, since they have extremely high global warming potential.
Lets say you have an air conditioning unit with 3 kg of R410.
If that leaks, it will cause as much global warming as 6 tons of CO2.
CO2 has been used as a working fluid in british powerplants.
The storage part particularly is something to work on. I think most plants use sand or melted salt but containing those kinds of materials for long time at hight temperatures is hard and could fail easily. The same could be said for the tracking motors, more so when we see that most places suitable for this technology are full of sand and wind. I think this has its place on a renewable grid but will never be the main source of energy
CSP is only worth it for the storage as Rosie said. I was surprised that she said it would only lose 1% per day. That seems very optimistic!
But can you use PV and use some type of heating element using Joule effect of the current to heat up the thermal mass?
So what's the efficiency of heating salts with PV? And the economics