More Cost Effective Solar Thermal Electric Power

As this blog recently reminded its readers Google has invested in two solar thermal companies, eSolar and BrightSource. Reuters reporter Poornima Gupta (with editing by Toni Reinhold) now informs the Carbon Market Community about the status of a prototype mirror. Google.org Bill Weihl expects the solar energy product ready in one to three years.

The German industrial giant Ferrostaal will use solar technology from eSolar in power plants to be built in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. eSolar is the California startup backed by Google and other investors. Bill Gross, eSolar’s founder and chairman, said the Ferrostaal agreement continues the startup’s strategy of striking deals with deep-pocketed partners… “We’re looking for partners all over that have that kind of strength to make these plants go forward.” eSolar already signed an agreement with a Chinese industrial company to build solar power plants that would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity; and, last year, eSolar agreed to license its technology to an Indian developer that plans to build solar projects with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts.

Google-sponsored R&D (Research and Development) has focussed on affordable renewable energy; and, since solar thermal energy is one of the more cost-effective types, Google has looked at unusual materials for the mirror’s reflective surface and substrate. Solar thermal electric power plants use fields of mirrors. When the mirrors track the sun, then the plants collect more solar energy.

Weihl said he has discussed the new heliostat technology with eSolar and BrightSource. “There is a decent chance that in a small number of years, we could have a 2-X reduction in cost,” he said.

3 Comments

jcwinnie

Posted 2010-2-28 at 11:38 am | Permalink

In other recent news, DoE (the U.S. Department of Energy) announced “$1.37 billion in conditional loan guarantees to BrightSource Energy Inc to help build three utility-scale solar power plants. The proposed plants are supposed to generate 400 megawatts of electricity.”
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-3-28 at 7:24 pm | Permalink

The New York Times has an article about how Alcoa Aluminum has expressed interest in making reflective solar troughs for the solar thermal power industry.

NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) in Colorado currently is testing Alcoa Solar Trough. Alcoa claims lower installation costs of their all-aluminum parabolic trough will cut the price of a solar field by 20 percent.

Parabolic troughs focus sunlight on liquid-filled receivers suspended over the mirrors to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. Parabolic trough technology has been in modern use in solar power plants since the early 1980s, but Alcoa executives said they saw an opportunity to refine the technology and get a foothold in the rapidly expanding renewable energy market.

“If you go out and look behind large parabolic troughs, you’ll find an elaborate truss structure,” said Rick Winter, a technology executive with Alcoa. “From our understanding of aerospace structures, we said if we can modify the wing box design used in aircraft and integrate a parabolic reflector, it would give us a light and stiff structure that would fundamentally affect the cost equation.” …

Aluminum manufacturing, however, is the nation’s most energy-intensive industry, according to the Energy Department. Mr. Kerns said Alcoa had not performed a life-cycle analysis of the total energy costs and benefits of deploying such parabolic troughs, but noted that the company planned to use recycled materials to make the solar collectors. “We can take the energy intensity out, as much of the structural elements have the potential to use recycled aluminum,” Mr. Kerns said. …

The Alcoa executives said the company planned to have its solar trough in commercial production within two to three years.

The Oil Drum had considerable discussion about the Alcoa entry into solar thermal after the Big Gav noted that “Alcoa Australia’s WA alumina refinery expansion remains stalled because of an inability to obtain cheap long term gas supplies.”

However Alcoa has managed to obtain long term supply contracts for its refinery in Victoria – but using brown coal fired power – the dirtiest power source of all.

If we consider these 3 news items together it would seem that perhaps they should have looked harder at some form of solar thermal power (perhaps combined with gas or geothermal energy) for their Australian operations, using technology they have developed themselves…

Marcos Dumay notes, “Alcoa isn’t working on collector tubes.

Those are normally made of stainless steel, externally coated with a nikel oxide known as “black nickel”, and only as thick as needed to support itself and the liquid inside it. Troughs are normaly kept inside glasses, with the interior air drained, to lower losses from conduction. That black nickel is a material with very hight absorbency of visible radiation, and very low absorbency of infra-red, reducing loses from emission; even then, those are the bigest losses of the plant and thus, they are the parameter that normally defines the temperature (it varies from one plant to the other).

You want to have as little absorbing surface as possible, to minimize emission losses. That is why you concentrate light into a small through. And, now that you asked, I have no idea what is the flow rate of normal through plants.

See also:
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-4-25 at 3:53 pm | Permalink

Via Peak Energy we learn that Joe Romm has an article at Forbes , “Nuclear Giant Areva Predicts Solar Thermal Boom.”

Earlier this year, French energy giant Areva bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP). And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”

CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage. CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas.

The Oil Drum wonders if Areva is “losing faith in the oft-predicted but unrealised ‘nuclear renaissance’.” Certainly, Areva’s best-known product has become very expensive and the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.

CSP, on the other hand, has just started down the experience curve and is poised to be one of the major winners in the low-carbon economy. Indeed, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek reports:

Areva SA of France predicts the global use of solar-thermal power will grow by about 30-fold this decade, a forecast that spurred the world’s largest maker of nuclear reactors to buy a California-based equipment maker.

The technology, which typically uses curved mirrors to focus sunlight to generate electricity, will be installed on plants with 20,000 megawatts of power potential by 2020, Anil Srivastava, Areva renewable energies executive vice president, said in an interview. That compares with about 625 megawatts today, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data.

“It is a very attractive market,” Srivastava said. Paris- based Areva aims to become a world leader in solar thermal, he said, after agreeing yesterday to buy Ausra Inc., a Mountain View, California-based maker of sun-driven steam generators used by power plants.

Many big international companies are trying to become leaders in CSP:

Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company, agreed last year to a $418 million purchase of Beit Shemesh, Israel- based Solel Solar Ltd. Abengoa SA, also an engineering company, is building 13 solar-thermal plants in Spain that will benefit from consumer subsidies for clean energy….

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has forecast the installed base to grow to as much as 34,000 megawatts worldwide by 2020, exceeding the estimate of the French atomic-reactor maker.

Whether 20 GW in 2020 or 34 GW, CSP is a very fast-growing market (see “World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in U.S. alone“). And ultimately that’s why Areva says it is jumping in:

The market for concentrated solar power plants is expected to grow substantially in the next decade with an average annual growth rate of 20% and should reach an estimated installed capacity of over 20 GW by 2020. With this acquisition, AREVA is poised to capture the leading position of this attractive and growing market.

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