Concentrating Solar Thermal Power with Built-in Storage
Concentrating Solar Power systems, or CSP, employ large fields of mirrors to reflect the direct beams of the sun onto high temperature receivers to power conventional steam-turbine power plants as large as 250 MWe. A number of utility-scale plants are in operation, construction or development in areas of high direct normal insolation (DNI) such as the US Southwest, So. Africa, Morocco, Chile, China and the MENA region. Solar configurations in use include parabolic troughs and power towers, enabling the use of high temperature molten salt storage systems that can drive the turbine at full power typically for 3 to 15 off-sun hours. In this way CSP uniquely offers the capability to provide solar power for steady base load and/or peak loads depending on the utility need.
Webinar presentations
Speakers
Dr. Fred Morse
Dr. Morse is the President of Morse Associates, Inc, a renewable energy consulting company formed in 1989. He is the former Senior Advisor of US Operations for Abengoa Solar, Inc. Dr. Morse first became involved in renewable energy issues in the late 1960s when he served as Executive Director of the White House Assessment of Solar Energy as a National Energy Resource. In his work at the US Department of Energy he played a significant role in defining and managing major solar energy R&D programs, including Solar Heating and Cooling, PV and CSP. Dr. Morse is Chairman of the Utility-Scale Solar Power Division of the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). Dr. Morse is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
Dr. David Kearney
Dr. David Kearney (Principal, Kearney & Associates) is a widely recognized international expert in CSP technology applied to solar electric power and solar thermal systems. For both US and international utilization he has carried out a variety of evaluation, design, feasibility and due diligence projects for industry, institutional (e.g., the World Bank Group) and utility clients. His early background includes management at SERI (now NREL) and participation in development of the SEGS facilities, which were the first commercial CSP plants. Dr. Kearney holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, is a Fellow of the American Solar Energy Society, and has authored a large number of cited publications on large-scale solar thermal power.
Hank Price
Hank Price is a founder and managing director of Solar Dynamics LLC, a new CSP technology company. He has spent his entire career working with CSP technologies, initially as the performance engineer for the SEGS parabolic trough plants, then as a systems analyst at NREL where he managed parabolic trough R&D for the U.S. DOE. He joined Abengoa Solar’s U.S. development team where he supported the design of Abengoa's two 250 MWe parabolic trough plants and led their U.S. R&D team.
Mark Mehos
Mark Mehos joined NREL in 1986 and manages the Thermal Sciences R&D group at NREL, which includes the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Program. Mark is the leader for the International Energy Agency's SolarPACES "Solar Thermal Electric Power Systems" task, which focuses on the development of international guidelines for modeling and acceptance testing of CSP systems. He has participated on several recent studies including the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Vision and Renewable Energy Futures studies, On the Path to SunShot study, and the CSP Gen3 Demonstration Roadmap. He is actively involved in the development of several new grid-integration studies investigating the interaction of CSP systems with thermal energy storage within the western U.S. interconnect.