High-flux/high-temperature solar thermal conversion: technology development and advanced applications

• Main Authors: Romero Manuel, González-Aguilar José
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: EDP Sciences 2016-01-01
• Series: Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability
• Online Access: https://www.rees-journal.org/articles/rees/full_html/2016/01/rees160011-s/rees160011-s.html

Solar Thermal Power Plants have generated in the last 10 years a dynamic market for renewable energy industry and a pro-active networking within R&D community worldwide. By end 2015, there are about 5 GW installed in the world, most of them still concentrated in only two countries, Spain and the US, though a rapid process of globalization is taking place in the last few years and now ambitious market deployment is starting in countries like South Africa, Chile, Saudi Arabia, India, United Arab Emirates or Morocco. Prices for electricity produced by today's plants fill the range from 12 to 16 c€/kWh and they are capital intensive with investments above 4000 €/kW, depending on the number of hours of thermal storage. The urgent need to speed up the learning curve, by moving forward to LCOE below 10 c€/kWh and the promotion of sun-to-fuel applications, is driving the R&D programmes. Both, industry and R&D community are accelerating the transformation by approaching high-flux/high-temperature technologies and promoting the integration with high-efficiency conversion systems.