July 4, 2012—Building off investments in innovative solar photovoltaic technologies, the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) has announced new investments for 21 total projects to further advance cutting-edge concentrating solar power technologies (CSP).
The awards span 13 states for a total of $56 million over three years, subject to congressional appropriations. The research projects, conducted in partnership with private industry, national laboratories, and universities, support the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, which sets forth a plan to aggressively drive innovation and make large-scale solar energy systems cost-competitive with other forms of unsubsidized energy.
According to the DOE, these awards will help speed innovations in new components to lower costs, increase operating temperatures and improve the efficiency of CSP systems. The three-year applied research projects announced will focus on achieving dramatic improvements in CSP performance, while driving progress toward the SunShot goal of 75 percent cost reduction, so that this promising technology can deliver more clean, renewable energy to millions of homes and businesses across the country.
CSP technologies use mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight to produce heat, which is then used to produce electricity. CSP systems are distinguished from other solar energy technologies by their ability to store energy as heat so that consumer demand can be met even when the sun is not shining, including during the night, explains the DOE. These systems can be combined with existing fossil-fuel plants to allow for flexible power generation.
These awards, made through the SunShot CSP Research and Development 2012 program, support efforts by businesses, universities, and national laboratories across 13 states to speed ahead of current state-of-the-art CSP technologies. The projects will develop innovative concepts for potential performance breakthroughs and demonstrate new approaches in the design of collectors, receivers, and power cycle equipment used in CSP systems.
Each of these subsystems is critical to CSP operation: the collectors collect and concentrate the Sun’s energy onto the receiver; the receiver accepts and transfers the heat energy to the power cycle; and the power cycle converts the heat energy into electricity. Developing low-cost collectors, high-temperature receivers, and high-efficiency power cycles is critical to subsequent power system integration, engineering scale-up, and commercial production for clean electricity generation, asserts the DOE.
