What do you think, can CSP really make a comeback?

Anyone else thought they could work by moonlight when they first clicked the video? 💀

Another benefit about CSP over PV is that thanks to the use of turbines (that have inertia) it can help stabilize the frequency of the power grid, unlike PV which uses inverters that are more prone to frequency changes due to having no inertia.

Like it or not, China's been the biggest enabler of clean technologies. I think the Chinese can figure out a way to make CSP competitive worldwide.

what do i think? i think there are several grid scale battery options that take over from lithium for longer term, which are less complex & less prone, and cheaper. more pv + more battery types will win the competition again. stored heat at old fossil plants is neat & cheap way to add peak and night power. i think melting stuff will always be more fraught & expensive. might be good for big industrial heat needs?

some additional remarks: The first solar thermal power plant was put into operation around 1913 in Egypt. It was a parabolic trough power plant designed to drive a steam engine because importing coal was too expensive. However, when oil was discovered in the region, the plant was shut down. In the 1980s, new parabolic trough power plants were built in California. They were used for peak load coverage at midday, as gas power plants for peak load were too expensive. In solar thermal power plants, parabolic troughs are mostly used because they are easier to scale. Tower power plants are more "exotic" in comparison. I don't understand why the article focuses so much on solar towers. Parabolic trough power plants can also store heat. Both variants have their advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage of tower power plants is the much higher temperature reached in the receiver (1200°C vs. 400°C in the parabolic trough). However, the disadvantages are the significantly higher construction costs and more complex operation. The technology and the combination with thermal storage are not that new. Moreover, there are many tower power plants that run without (or less) problems compared to Cresent Dunes. For example, Morocco has built huge facilities in the last 10 years. I don't quite understand the goal of this article. It is interesting that China is now increasingly investing in this technology but the other things are not that new. I also miss a comparison of the cost of storage per kWh in batteries versus thermal storage. What is the factor here? Also weird, that the video does not mention the DLR in cologne. They do a lot of important research in this field. they also have the only tower power plant in Germany in Jülich near Cologne. where they do research. Instead they go to Australia. Funny because the DW (Deutsche Welle) is based in Bonn. which is less then 100 km from Cologne and Jülich.

Yeah, I heard about it. I was hot on the idea twenty years ago. I just couldn’t get other people excited enough about it. Say is there away you can turn thermal energy directly into electricity? Infrared photovoltaic

Solar PV panels tend to be dark/black, great at absorbing heat... And can hit 60°C in intense areas. So wire a cooling loop behind the panels to collect this thermal energy, and use that as a secondary generation mechanism ala thermal battery.

Yes. Great to hear about the new CSP developments. Interesting you did not mention the small scale use of CSP for heat and potentially electricity. There are several European companies that are offering this technology. See solar thermal Europe.

So basically just molten salt batteries? Couldn't you just hook that onto a photovoltaic plant? I get it might be less efficient transferring electrical energy to heat rather than direct heat transfer but if we're just looking for energy storage, I don't get how this is that much better considering the added cost, space and engineering needed for concentrated heat.

The problem with CSP is that they sacrifice economics and complexity to the god of collection efficiency. If you can reduce the efficiency by 10-20% and half the cost, you have a more economic viable solution. Instead of an extremely complex system of mirrors focusing on one point, use much less complex system of many parabolic mirror troughs with the collector running along the trough at the parabolic focal point. Instead of running the troughs north and south requiring constant tracking at speed through out the day, align the troughs east and west, requiring only a micro adjustment up/down once a day. Instead of requiring powerful motors to adjust the entire trough and collector, only adjust the collector. Each of these steps reduces the cost of complexity at a small loss of collection efficiency. It would be better to spend a little more on a phase change material that is a little less efficient and stays liquid at room temperature, than build in the cost to recover from salt becoming solid in the collection tubes when the temperature cannot be maintained.

YES! I have heard of CSP. I used to see it each time I drove from LA to Las Vegas. I was so happy to see sustainable energy being produced. I love that it can store energy for so long even without sun! That's a service gap that we need to fill. Thanks for this video. I just moved from CA to northern Portugal and I'm having a hard time finding anyone to install a wind turbine at my home. It's my first priority due to all the wind my property experiences. THEN I'll fill the gap with PV.

Sadly a bit misleading unnecessarily. This isn't solar power at night, it's thermal battery power at night. We have similar potential energy batteries for decades in the form of Pumped Hydro, and new ones including raising heavy objects then lowering them to run a turbine, or heating salt or rocks as the medium

Would love to see more geothermal plants - underneath our feet, we have essentially unlimited energy.

Guess we'll see what plays out, but pretty sure PV + storage will be more economical than getting the higher complexity molten salt of concentrated solar to work. There's so many options for stationary storage from PV that are so much less complex: Li ion, redox flow, pumped hydro, thermal salt/sand, flywheels, etc. All of these eliminate a lot of complexity/moving parts compared to a single unified molten salt concentrated solar system even if having modest efficiency losses.

I first heard about CSP when I was learning what climate change was about 20 years ago in school and looking into the various technologies society was planning on using to fight it (nuclear, wind turbines, solar cells, etc). I really liked CSP. It struck me as being an elegant solution, especially in the world we had back then where solar cells were extremely expensive. The idea of just bouncing the sunlight into something that would heat water for a steam turbine seemed simple and easy to scale up. I'm disappointed to see that the world didn't end up doing much with this technology. But it does make sense given how cheap solar cells got. We need to be smart with our money. No need throwing money at expensive, unreliable forms of electricity production when we have affordable, proven ones.

These remind me of Helios one from New Vegas

You can easily hybrid CSP with PV, using the fluid medium to cool multijunction bifacial PV targets at the focus of parabolic troughs. PV efficiency increases as irradiance increases toward ten times peak sun and temperature drops toward 100 C. Not hot enough for hot rocks storage, but plenty for compressed air that lasts days or weeks in insulated underground tanks.

Great information, thank you! Kind of wishing i went to school for this sort of engineering

CSP power would be an excellent architecture for space based solar.

If you had done any real research you would have found the Solar Chimney power plants. They are far simpler, *way less maintenance* , and they don't turn unsuspecting birds into smoking lumps of char that fall to the ground with a trail of black smoke. People that work in/at/on the CSP plants you are promoting call them 'black smokers'. In fact they built a small pilot plant Solar Chimney in Spain almost 30 years ago and even at the very small scale in an area with ridiculous winds this unit was actually profitable. The videos are probably still here on YT. Its essentially a giant greenhouse with the canopy sloped slightly upwards towards the center and a huge 'chimney' several hundred meters tall to use the convection/suction to harvest the heat of the whole area under the canopy. In the smaller scale unit they had one large turbine inside the chimney that operated at near full capacity in the daytime and at a reduced rate at night (when power demand is lower). At very large scales several turbines at the base would be used. Some have proposed putting large pools of water at the very warmest center area to store even more heat for overnight operation. Note that the greenhouse area was at least 90% usable for growing things, only the very center was too hot for such activities. This means these are many times more environmentally friendly as well.

There's a startup working on having floating mirrors in the orbit which can reflect sunlight onto solar panels at night and I expected atleast something of that sort when I clicked on this vid

I'm not a power engineer, but know a bit about electricity. They glossed over the part where you can use photovoltaic panels to melt salt or sodium or other. They say it's not efficient, but the panels do not all need to be in 1 location. Panels can be scattered over the grid and excess daytime power used at a generating facility (where the big wires already go) to melt the salt/sodium/other.

They made one in the desert of Morocco over 10 years ago, and it's been so unprofitable they switched to photovoltaic for the following expansions.

Oh i see that plant every time i drive from LA to Vegas. I recall driving through one night and they were commemorating someone from NASA.... I don't recall who, but they used the mirrors to make an image of her in the night sky. It was a lovely spectacle and a memory I would never forget.

Thank you for the research on this! I remembering learning about CSPs and then not hearing about them again - good to learn from the mistakes of Crescent Dunes. Energy reliability during all hours has been one of the major issues for most renewable energies, so this is pretty exciting!

The video really shows that solar PV is becoming ever more dominant. And that's a good thing. Every other technology in places with a lot of sun will have to find niches around it. Whether that's wind, battery storage, hydro storage (pumped hydro or holding back hydro), compressed air, or CSP will most likely depend on local circumstances. If those cannot cover everything and demand can't be made to flex, then fast-starting gas will have to be the backup ( green hydrogen is along way off from being able to play this role) Base-load technologies are at even more of a disadvantage where solar is king. The money they lose while solar PV is going has to be made up for at other times.

As always, amazing video, thank you!

Holland has been producing electric from sea tides for a long time if I am not mistaken. Tidal current is an unstoppable and very clean energy source. But of course you need to have a coast with strong tidal currents for this. Atlantic and Pacific Canadian coasts have very strong tidal currents, but we Canadians do not want to disturb fishes' beauty sleep. So, this project was under debate several years ago. I don't know if the politicians and scientists made their mind about this or not.

great tech, seen it on other channnels, but your vid is very good too, great info, thanx, keep it up!!!

Ther is CSP without towers. Example, light concentrated on black tubes with oil.

The mathematics might work for now. But soon PV panels will reach an efficiency of 35%. At that efficiency it will be cheaper to heat graphite or salt and store the heat than using CSPs. CSPs really have no future except industries that require high heat and can be located in deserts.

The solar power plants in Cities Skylines are CSPs!

Sand is a much easier material to heat and store energy in, It could be heated using either PV or Solar Thermal. It doesn't even need to flow.

Gemasolar in Spain showed this tech some 20 years ago, if it had been scaled up 80 fold it would have given an avg output of 1GWe the same as a 1GWe nuclear reactor, but trhe cost was $18B vs maybe $5B for nuclear. The idea of storing heat in molten salt, but instead of using a complex array of mirrors and towers taking up vast amounts of land and prone to problems, instead use a primary loop of Flibe salt with fission, the reactor makes constant heat all day long and transfers it to the secondary loop for storage. The generator capacity can be upto 3 times beyond avg output capacity so that electrical can be very variable on the output all day long that can counter the production of wind and solar, so a triple win. No batteries needed. If the wind and solar are got rid of then the MSRs can easily drive the variable demand of the grid without wasting land. Its always about energy density. Almost all MSRs in development get this storage for free.

Another great video! It seems to me that the sodium heat battery that we saw being used as a replacement for coal or gas furnaces could be melded into this tech. So to stop the solidifying of the salt you'd use grid electricity to keep the heat up. It sounds like a tough engineering problem

What prevents them from running their liquid through a skinny black pipe inside of mirrored half pipes? They could use the cold stuff to cool it down if the temp got too high... doesn't this setup loose a lot of heat to the air if it needs to travel from the outer corners of the field to the tower?

Battery progress is currently very fast. It’ll probably be normal panels plus batteries for storage that give cities solar power at night

I've driven by the Tonopah site a few times. It looks really cool when it's operating, but my God is it bright. It's like a tiny yet brighter sun.

One may even use energy from the solar panels to heat the storage in certain circumstances, simply to stabilize the grid. Since one might need a heater somewhere in case the plant solidifies it would even make money.

If CSP costs 2.5 times more (excluding the storage system) than solar PV, it's the same cost as using PV and resistive heaters to generate the heat, assuming 40% efficiency from heat to power. That is, when using solar PV that only feeds directly into storage. But, thermal storage for on demand power generation can be used to store excess power on the grid, from any source, which means CSP has to be able to generate power for a lot less than twice the cost of solar PV to have a chance of being relevant, and that requirement also includes that the CSP system does that, reliably. So, the probability of CSP becoming impart part of the solution is very small. Large scale, cost efficient production of CSP systems doesn't have to compete with current alternatives, it will have to be able to compete with whatever alternatives that are available when that large scale production is supposed to happen. Meaning, they would have to be able to compete with solar PV, batteries and so on, that is even better and cheaper that what's currently available.

This made me think a lot more than I was expecting. Thank you!

CSP can be used for heating homes/buildings, in addition to generating electricity. I’d like to see more on that.

Will flow batteries outcompete CSP for storage as PV outcompeted CSP for generation? I think it will, It can store energy for long periods, can scale generation and capacity independantly, and is getting cheaper as development continues.

Yes CSP has it's place in the renewable energy markets, re grid level storage molten salt it great for this application, regarding wind and solar lithium ion phosphate and maybe in the near future sodium ion batteries for short duration storage, highview powers liquid air battery is another very good option for longer duration storage which is often overlooked and should be talked about a bit more being very scalable and cheaper than other grid level storage systems.

Photovoltaic panels could also be used to store electricity as heat for the storage, not just mirrors. Separate solar farms for daytime use and some for storing heat for the night. Or maybe combined photovoltaic solar farms producing almost constant power 24/7. Add a smallish battery into mix and get even more constant current. During the day 35% of the solar panels could generate electricity to the grid using batteries to even the production (clouds etc.). Rest of the panels would generate electricity transferred to stored heat used by turbine in the night time. The ratio of day/night production could be easily managed and changed.

From what I've read (and you guys mentioned) liquid salt seemed to be the achilles heel, that and the gold rush for PVs. I dunno if moving to sodium solves the problem but this being a storage medium seems like it has a huge potential.

There are BESS battery energy storage systems which can store excess energy during the day from PV generation just like the molten salt case

I hope China's and Australia's CSPs will become successful examples in the upcoming future.

I believe that the sunlight could be run through a prism breaking it down into it's frequencies. The visible light could be run through fiber to where it was needed. Any non heat intense frequencies could be used for different functions which are generated now. Heat intense could be separated It would multiply the efficiency.

CSP is a thermal battery that has it’s place in the grid. But the incredibly cheap thermal batteries of Antora energy can completely decarbonize industrial heat which accounts for 60+% of carbon emissions by purchasing or even profiting from negatively priced solar energy during the day. Antora will outcompete fossil fuel (coal) powered industrial heat.

What they won't tell you is that CSP is highly geographically dependent. Very few places on Earth have the right kind of conditions for CSP to be feasible. That is why most of these installations are either in the Mojave, Chile, Gobi desert or southern Spain. If you add some parts of North Africa, Rajasthan (India) and Australia, that is all the CSP you can ever deploy. With PV and Wind production at record levels and renewable power congesting most of the transmission grids in the developed world, the practicality of wheeling CSP from these limited places across the globe is just not there; even if we consider the advancements in HVDC. For a 24/7 renewable grid, we need something else, given that lithium batteries are not the solution for large scale grid level round the clock storage either!

PV can be distributed among the population quite easily and relatively cheap. You can bring it into rural remote area without the need for massive infrastructure and heavy cost to erect the solar power structure. I guess PV is perfect for home user, but we still need utility scale of electric power generation for industry, that'd be stuff like CSP, nuclear, gas turbine, etc. My home use just 5KWh of battery with 2.5KWp panel and that's enough for everyday needs and usage. I imagined if you live in a much hotter or colder region indeed you might need way more power, but still they're pretty easily affordable and easy to find. Even my older more than a decade old PV panel still producing power close to their label, maybe like just 80% but they augment my newer panels as I have empty space for it too. Maybe one day if I ever need those space then I'll get rid of that older pv panel and put newer more efficient (and wayyy much cheaper) PV panels there.

another forgotten point, PV works better in cold conditions, CSP is best in extremely hot areas. Money, demand and technology are more in the cold countries.so even if PV was worst (I am not saying that) it would have gained more attention, investment, subsidies and research and hence got cheaper anyway

I am glad that germany changed that law. The in-depth research into photovoltaics to make it more cheap really helped us, especially those of use that live off grid. Photovoltaics is really domestic freedom. But people should never ever stop researching other technologies like CSP, or other storage technologies (direct or indirect, as you can use photovoltaics too for heating up the salt). Or even fluid batteries. Never stop. At one point in time it will turn out to be very useful.

It seems like these would be great for providing off-peak power supply during the evening hours while photovoltaics on rooftops could be providing daytime power. So the CSP style solar generating plants could provide a base load Supply and wind and photovoltaics would be able to supplement the grid for Peak daytime electrical use. Round that out with hydroelectric and some Modern nuclear power plants, and we could actually have a carbon free grid.

Combine solar Hybrid PV (with heat recovery) and CSP to get more out of the solar energy. This way we can get maximum output and high efficiency and use solar stored energy in night time.

Solar PV and CSP are great combination. The industrialised countries should also help low income countries towards smooth transition to alternative energy.

If you get the chance go and see one of these in person! It is blindingly bright. Almost like a miniature star sitting on top of a tower.

I need to remind that in the grid the generation and demand must be precisely coupled or your frequency changes and the whole grid collapses. And not only the generation changes, so are the demands. There are something called "peaks to valley" and it's not necessarily the night to be valley. Actually sunset-midnight is usually a peak since people return their homes and use their appliances. A large unified grid may distribute its power around thus avoids wasting electricity and that is ALSO China's case. Small independent grids will have a hard time handling its peaks and valleys even if you do have the CSP. That's why you overloaded your plant and froze your molten salt. In a well designed grid you might as well worry about overheating your salt rather than freezing it.

May be someday we'll be able manufactur mirror style PV that can also reflect light and work like a CSP too. It will generate energy in both ways

The thing with mirrors is the correct angle of the sun's rays can be a pain in the ass

It can be restated that Carnot efficiency 1-Tc/Th {temperature in Kelvins} is for an ideal gas, not a fluid with a phase change. Condensing steam makes a big vacuum?

Any updates on the CO2 battery from Energy Dome? This seemed like a viable energy storage solution.

Also a big advantage is that it has a turbine. You need this for stabilizing the AC frequency.

All pumping where the medium varies in viscosity has issues. You need a fluid or gas that can carry temperatures to a starage tank like the sand store in Finland, and from there the water is heated for the turbine. Do that and then you are singing!

Pumped hydro works day and night. Just ask N Portugal.

5:27 what an efficient shape. No wonder it discharged into the ground. Bad jokes aside, wasn't there also some technology where they had tubes going around photovoltaic panels heating an oil or something for storage as well?

For storage there are better technologies like hydropower from big dams. But also nuclear energy and gas turbines. Usually cap plants are connected to gas turbines to keep the salt molten if there's not enough sun light, so it's not even necessarily emission free.

why not simply apply real time pricing of electricity, and allow them to export and import electricity? This will encourage everyone to build their own energy storage, and lower their energy consumption during high demand, flattening the demand curve of the day

For one good, means bad, reason is CSPs take a lot of land and not suitable for rooftops. So unlike PV you need a lot of capital (money) and skill for CSPs. In my hood, San Diego, I see roughly 50% of the houses have rooftop PVs.

Huh. I didn’t realize how badly designed this type of power “generation” is. Thank you for explaining its huge faults. 😮

Sodium salt has problems, as mentioned, but pure sodium does too. It is highly reactive. One solution not discussed here is photovoltaics in the desert with energy stored in sand batteries. They aren't that efficient, but they are cheap, and it should be easy to source the sand.

I prefer pumped storage hydroelectricity, but the more alternatives, the better!

Simply more research has to carried out for a more situable heated element, if a better one is found that is able to heat up in less time and remain at constant temp for much longer with good insulation, then the problem with CSP is solved.

Harness 1 Solar thermal power generation & thermal storage “India One”, a 1 MW solar thermal power plant has became operational since 2017 near the Brahma Kumaris´ Shantivan Campus in Abu Road. Om Shanti Retreat Centre, Gurugram also has a 1 MW scale hybrid solar power plant using Lead-Acid and Lithium-Ion batteries to ensure constant power supply. I have seen this plant it is inpressive .

It would be interesting to see if you could use solar panels as the mirrors for this concentrated solar power plant.. and another system that I think will be the future system is using water hyacinth farms as the solar collectors and extracting the energy as biomass in a digester system..

I heard the mirrors were not up to scratch and very hard to maintain, very expensive to make and require some exotic elements to even make them last as well as they do, so no CSP won't be making a comeback because its way simpler to hook photovoltaics up to emerging battery and flywheel technologies.

Absolutely true , Very informative fact . Solar Thermal is more effective and environmentally friendly than PV .

Will See ... PV has lots more potential as well with some of the Future developments ..Even Combining the 2 technologies such as Solar Thermal (PVT) to produce Heat and electricity ... CSP requires a larger area and more capital intensive .. But maybe larger utilities will want to rethink/invest in CSP Tech

CSP can be a great additional form of solar power. It probably will always be much smaller than PV, only like 5% of solar PV capacity, but it might nevertheless make a significant difference. The key question is whether being able to sell energy whenever energy is most expensive is enough to make up for CSP being more expensive than solar PV overall, and whether it is better than solar PV when used with other storage solutions like batteries.

woaw nice video, really interesting subject!!

Why we've to use the Salt or Na in the heating tower. Instead, we can use the Water itself in the Heating tower and the Salt should be used in the Storage tanks or nearby water tank. So, we can avoid Solidifying Salt issues in the pipes. Steam should be used turn the turbines and to heat the salt in the tanks at the same time for power storage.

Thanks for the invention

The capital expense and operations and maintenance costs are significantly more expensive than PV solar. PV solar is being constructed for less than 20 USD cents per mw/hr compared to 50. Then you have the long-term O&M costs which are prohibitive.

It's clear that a solution to the overnight clean energy problem is getting closer and closer.

Much more important would be to make solar power during winter. Storage from day to night is relatively easy. But to shift energy from summer to winter requires much huger stores. Additionally, much more highly developed population lives in the northern hemisphere, so transferring energy from one hemisphere to the other will not help much.

The concept of storing energi in moten salt can have a big potentiale on obsolite coal powerplants. You got the turbine and the gridt connection. Build store tanks and heat it with exes wind or solar power

If you have excess pv power, like they often do in California, couldn’t you send the excess to the salt tower for storage? Also, if the salt is about to solidify, couldn’t you import power to the salt to prevent it?

Surely, I heard about CSP. It's part of Anno 2070 and was discussed a lot before PV got that cheap and deployable in smaller scale as well, like at home or on a balcony.

The problem with CSP is that most plants are realized in desert regions since the plants need a lot of land and deserts also offer the optimal micro climate for them. And that means long ways to the main consumers of energy - in most cases there are not many industrial or population centers near deserts. The VAST project could address some of those limitations. But I remember also the short-lived hype about the solar updraft tower plant in Manzanares which used solar heat to power a horizontal wind turbine. There were some follow-up projects in China and Namibia, but they became never big enough. Those plants had however the advantage that you could use part of the covered area also for (greenhouse) agriculture - maybe there are some development opportunities also. (You could e.g. reduce the updraft during daytime to use more residual heat during the night, after the air outside has cooled down.)

Are solar panels only use the photons and not the radiative heat of the sun? How can we also use the sun's heat? And directly convert in into electricity?

Cool! I like this approach! 😎👍

1:07 Traditional solar cells can be leverage to generate power at night in a few edge-cases. You can use a thermoelectic generator to take advantage of the temperature difference between the night sky (3k) and the air at the ground. I suppose a plant storing molten salt will get an even bigger temperature difference out of the night sky.

CSP now differs from the past in these ways:- (1) Modular CSP is more economical than mono CSP (USA) (2) Sodium heat storage is durable, & China is going to be the 1st country to produce sodium cheaper & cheaper (sodium batteries & CSP investment) in all likelihood (3) CSP storage is much more efficient than PV battery storage (4) Will CSP electricity generation require as much water in future? Can CSP used steam/water be useful for something else? Very exciting possibilities for the future indeed!

Vague memory and used in game (CS) 🙂 Looks like a more sustainable form (less -rare- materials) but with the mechanical turning of the mirrors maybe more maintenance required? Kind of wondering how this can be more efficient then batteries or heating the salt (or metal) during the day and then using this in the night: it requires clout free, and needs lots of m2 so probably not near population-centers (?).

CSP is much more effective if you need heat instead of electricity, be it for cooking or industrial processes.

CSP COULD ALSO BE USED TO DESALINATE SEA WATER?

Why we covert heat into electricity, heat is an major requirements, almost 30% of the total load , we should developed CSP heat with thermal storage for industrial heat application, another PV with heat pump plus solar thermal can produce Green steam / Heat in an economical way.

Some additional remarks: - If more alternatives are available, the cost is crucial. The focus is on storage. Besides molten salt and batteries, hydrogen via electrolysis may be a candidate (in that case PV produced) - The more fossil based electric energy decreases due to policy, stored energy will become more expensive on the market, thus being attractive for this technology. - The production costs of CSP electric energy depen on the available sunlight, thus i.e. Northern Africa was a preferred candidate. The transport to European consumers was a technical challenge back then. High Voltage DC transmission, which is best suited for long distances, has been improved lately. - One issue remains with regard to Northern Africa: Political instability