How we can make solar power at night
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ส.ค. 2024
- We all know about photovoltaic solar panels. But there's another, almost forgotten type of solar energy: concentrated solar power. Its big advantage is that it can store the sun's heat for a long time and turn it into electricity when needed - for example at night, when normal solar panels lie idle. Is it set for a comeback?
#planeta #solarenergy #concentratedsolarpower
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Credits:
Reporter: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann
Video Editor: Frederik Willmann
Supervising Editor: Kiyo Dörrer
Factcheck: Alexander Paquet
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon
Read more:
CSP project databases:
solarpaces.nrel.gov/?...
cspdata.com/
NREL best practices study:
www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/75...
Status of CSP plants installed worldwide:
www.mdpi.com/2571-8797/6/1/18
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:18 How CSP works
02:49 Technology race
05:07 Crescent Dunes
07:03 Comeback?
10:51 Conclusion
What do you think, can CSP really make a comeback?
We need all sources of energy. That just need to be correctly sized for the correct loads.
Yes, beyond night-time power CSP is also useful to generate high-temperature heat for some hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel or cement, but admittedly these other avenues remain speculative.
Eventually, mirrors and lenses should make a bigger comeback, because they are needed to reach the thermodynamic efficiency limit for converting sunlight to electricity. So if we want to maximize the power harvested per unit of land area used we need those focusing techniques. This could be in the far future though (Dyson sphere anyone?)
Maybe maybe not the future is a string of theory and possibility
@@5th_decile ya
Frankly, no.
Batteries are expected to drop in price by more than half before the end of the decade, and to continue getting cheaper at an astonishing pace. And photovoltaic panels are also getting even cheaper, despite already often being the cheapest way of generating electricity. CSP might be cheaper for dispatchable night time energy right now, at least in China, but by the time China would be ready to export it at scale battery-backed photovoltaic generation will be much cheaper than it's now.
The only exception I see is if a country bans imports of Chinese-made solar panels and/or batteries but doesn't do the same to CSP; then it has a chance to compete in price.
Incidentally, this also doesn't touch the ecological issues with CSP. Whereas solar panels can be combined with native vegetation to create habitats for local fauna, CSP often roast and kill all flying fauna, from insects to large birds.
Anyone else thought they could work by moonlight when they first clicked the video? 💀
Yes, because of the clickbait thumbnail.
Yes I did
no
Fr 😂
Yup :D
Moonlight Worked for the Ancient Greeks in light houses I believe
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.
Inverters are improving but certainly this is a benefit to various systems including csp heat storage facilities
@@MrBot-jb2sj Let’s add giant flywheels to take us through the night. Or pump a lake above us and let it drain back at night for evening demands most energy used for cooling isn’t it?
@jmanke6057 Pumped storage is a decent option, the major hurdle with it is it very location based just like hydro in general, you need a pretty steep incline and a big elevation change for it to be efficient, but it is super cool that you can use your turbine as a pump by running it in reverse :) Idk where flywheels are at but just going from PV -> electric motor -> flywheel back to electricity again is probably losing a lot more efficiency.
@@MrBot-jb2sj The most current administration needs to do a lot of study on ways to best derive hydrogen as a kid I experimented making hydrogen in limited amounts I needed. There are a multitude of ways to make it. Many chemicals from our swimming pool and things in my surroundings also split water into its counter parts with electricity my parents just stressed I do things safely or not do them I even was able to splash water droplets on a plate I heated at near 500 degrees hydrogen being light was easy to collect. I always meant to continue but got interested in other things being a 3rd grader and realizing dangers involved expanding production as a child working with hydrogen I moved to hot air ballon’s 🎈instead. Certainly an adult could have expand production safely. I agree hydrogen in another source perhaps NH3 and some sort of a catalyst could lower emissions in much better way then current diesel technology utilize it. Some energy groups are planing to use natural gas and hydrogen to clean the combustion process for steam plants till others ideas get made practical. I believe DWP of Los Angeles is partnering with a plant near Delta Utah will be online around end of 2025. Seems to me large users might be best approach then forcing individuals unless it can be cheap and practical. There is always a better way we just don’t always see it.
@@MrBot-jb2sj Nothing ever perfect but hope a future administration who ever they are encourage multiple ways because every situation has some degree of merit
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.
I feel like this has to have been thought about and just can’t be worth the hassle??? I’ve had this exact thought too
Gotta imagine having a tonne of copper heat pipes off the back of every solar panel would be crazy expensive
You are talking about Hybrid PVT (Photovoltaic and Thermal) panels. They do exist already, though the thermal heat created is not high enough to be able to run turbines for electricity generation.... they are great for residential hot water and home heating. I was looking at using PVT panels on my new build summer house in the next few years.
Yeah so one of the problems with this is that attaching anything passive will reduce the heating power of the panel and cause it's temperature to rise. This in turn causes the efficiency of the solar panel to decrease. So unless the cooling is active and the coolant is initially at a lower temperature, you will lose the efficiency. Also it will never get hot enough to melt metal or salts, maybe enough to boil water but that's it.
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
Umm...I think they quite clearly said that it wasn't solar power at night. That's literally the whole point that CSP found a new niche as energy storage instead of power generation. And comparing CSP to batteries and hydro, the difference is that CSP is totally self-powering. You can charge batteries or pump water for hydro but they are viable only when there's excess energy than can be used for to create that storage. CSP will automatically charge itself every day regardless if there's excess power or not.
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
Yes, thermophotovoltaics - cells are similar to photovoltaic ones but are designed to convert the specific wavelengths of infrared radiation into electricity. You can read more here 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04473-y
No despite what the other comment from DW says about thermo photo voltaics. It is simple physics, you want to convert heat into electrical energy you want that heat to be as high as possible in absolute Kelvin temps, the machine that does the conversion will follow Carnot limits and the most efficient conversion reaches upto 60% or so far higher than the photo cells could ever do.The ideal heat source is always going to be fission giving about 1000K in Flibe salts, the convesion can be done with Super Critical CO2 engines which reach 60% eff.
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.
PV transform 20% of energy to electricity while thermal is >80% efficient. Then the electric energy needs to be transformed to thermal.
Yes, its a glorified Carnot battery. But: putting in 1KWh of CSP heat is cheaper than 1 kWh of (most) electricity other than curtailed power. Usually, it is more efficient to use the electricity for something more useful other than heating hundreds of tones of salt up.
There are even cheaper sand batteries and there is Power-To-X (gigantic heating element) in cities with district heating grade water tanks. There are many ways to store energy. However, I can imagine that in a hot and not too windy climate, an efficency of 60% (absorption) * 30% (steam generator) is preferrable over 20% (PV) * 30% (steam generator). And, in contrast to what is said in the video, Li+ batteries become effordable for day-to-evening-and-morning electric power shift right now.
@@Angel24Marin exactly this. CSP: ~100% efficiency (sun -> heat) * 20% (heat -> power) = ~20% total efficiency - solar & heat-batteries: 20% solar-efficiency * 100% (electricity -> heat) * 20% (heat -> electricity again) = 20%*20% = 4% total efficiency - which is expensive - more expensive than CSP technology
Or you could use fission energy to heat a primary Flibe loop and transfer heat to secondary loop for storage and variable generation.
Its ironic to see these CSP and even proposed Fusion power plants generate the heat in the most complex and expensive way possible recognizing the value of molten salts but can't see how much simpler it would be to use fission in a primary loop. But folks gotta worship their their sun gods.
Would love to see more geothermal plants - underneath our feet, we have essentially unlimited energy.
The potential of geothermal seems so great but most of it is still untapped. 🔥 We have a video checking why is it so 👉 th-cam.com/video/c7dy0hUZ9xI/w-d-xo.html
I've been keeping my eye on Quaise and what they've been working on with their potentially ground breaking (pun super intended lol) drilling head that may unlock geothermal virtually anywhere. I'd love some updates on them, it's been a bit since I've heard anything new other than the testing going well.
Geothermal may end up most utilized in the future drilling being one biggest cost restriction focus energy may bore to needed
depth in many areas only minimal limiting factor might be type of soil and rock underneath when energy bores through however new boring technology may make this sensible and many other mute except few others seem more practical. I would like to see multitude of approaches the best will win out. At this time it’s hard to beat natural gas till few problems get figured out for the other choices. Believe a natural gas and Hydrogen utilization near Delta Utah might be 1st cleaner station. Interesting thing happens to water when droplets fall on a plate heated above 480 degrees and many sources of NH3 might be tried this plant may test many ways to derive hydrogen we may just haven’t found best yet. Hope this plant goes into operation end of 2025. Also glad to see many our pondering additional options we see it soon if practical
One of the benefits of the Shale Natural Gas Extraction industry growth in the US has been that we've gotten VERY good at drilling complex networks. We can repurpose that technology to use in Geothermal by digging shallower holes but more spread out, creating long loops that can extend much further and help capture more heat.
I know my comment is maybe a bit off topic but apparently abandoned coal mines generate quite a bit of heat (after being abandoned they get filled with water), you can bore a hole and and circulate that water trough heat exchanger for district heating (if the water is not hot enough, just raise it to proper temperature with giant heat pump meant for district usage). District heating is great way to decrease energy use, a more environmentally friendly district heating is even better. Now one great advantage geothermal power plants over the method i mentioned above is co-generation, something that makes district heating affordable is selling waste heat to homes rather than creating heat from scratch with district heat pump.
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?
I agree that I think other batteries will win, but I think that some of those technologies will be thermal batteries that work just like the CSE plant but without the mirrors and tower. Phase transitions take tons of energy, so storing energy in that phase transition between solid and liquid or liquid and gas I think will be very attractive.
Agreed for general long term storage. There's bricks that can store up to almost 1200f which covers the VAST majority of industrial purposes, but not many things can generate that kind of heat to be stored. There's also sand batteries for long term storage, but they can't get quite as hot. However I see CSP being useful for smaller scale or lower temp industry. Things that need say a couple hundred degrees could have their roofs covered in mirrors aimed at a tower with a storage tank at it's base to allow them to run emission free.
The batteries are way too expensive - even more expensive than nuclear from a levelized cost perspective. Sure they're constantly getting cheaper, and fast, but not fast enough to compete with pumped-hydro or this (and there could well be floor; its unreasonable to expect prices to fall forever). They also have a limited lifetime and are tough to recycle. They require a great deal more mining than this. Melting things will always be cheaper than charging and discharging batteries over and over.
You don't have to keep melting things, if you had a permanent source of heat energy to keep the molten salt in liquid phase, then you get storage for free with variable on demand output. The ideal input heat is of course fission, almost all the MSR designs have the fission heat engineered as a nuclear island topping up the heat in tanks just outside the island. Moltex comes to mind.
@@eliorbilow8797The molten salts in the video *are* thermal batteries of sort.
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.
You missed Sodium ion batteries.
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.
These remind me of Helios one from New Vegas
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.
parabolic trough collectors have been tried too. Their downside is they don't get as hot.
I remember a system in the US south west that used oil to collect the heat, problem was that it cought fire and destroyed the entire system.
@@nathanlewis42 They were even mentioned in the video 1:30 : almost as a throw away line "they work the same way".
I think that's what "Vast" are doing. They use array of smaller plants instead of gigantic one, so the parabolic mirror configuration can be easier to manufacture.
@@nathanlewis42 Cmiiw, they switched from molten salt to liquid sodium, so the heat doesn't have to be as high as needed by the molten salt.
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.
Sadly they dont believe in a collaborative way of building new tech, so whatever they achieve is for themselves!
@@ecoideazventures6417 their entire cultural narrative is they are rising from a 100 year war
@@ecoideazventures6417 please give an example
They are just desperate, because their coal plants are killing their people (not just by damaging lungs, but somehow they made their coals radioactive). However, they need a lot of electricity or their economy will collapse. Especially during drought when Yangzi river system has turn into creeks and the Three Gorges Dam is close to empty.
@@ecoideazventures6417 Last year, China launched the "African Solar Belt" plan, which will help at least 50,000 African families. In fact, China advocates cooperation and believes in a win-win situation, but the West wanna suppress China's tech development and impose sanctions for geopolitical reasons.
As always, amazing video, thank you!
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.
@@royking7298 Don’t forget some neighborhoods are going to try to tell you how you should do it not often connected to logic. You may want to move out of California unless you have one great job or are an actor weather is good most the time but last 4 years most of California gone to heck with bad policies. I pray you in a blessed area of the state.
your beard is supreme
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.
Throwing money at technology that can scale up to mass production is also really good.
Our institutes that release new technologies that companies end up picking up and mass producing are working hard and I'm always impressed with what's possible in the lab that looks so simple to do, but then doing it in massive scales, you will need someone willing to pay for building the machines and also importantly the experience in mass production. If there's chemical processes involved you just hate your life
@@ayoCC True. They do explain that that's part of what made solar PV so cheap. Maybe we need investment like that in other up ad coming tech like CSP, SMR nuclear, geothermal, etc.
Nuclear and small scale hydro are the only viable ones in Western countries.
20 years ago was 2004. 😢
@@CountingStars333 The older you are, the faster time goes by.
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.
great tech, seen it on other channnels, but your vid is very good too, great info, thanx, keep it up!!!
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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!
Great information, thank you! Kind of wishing i went to school for this sort of engineering
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 remember a device like that being used as a weapon in a James Bond movie.
You probably mean company called Reflect Orbital. They aim to launch their first mirrors into orbit next year. If they dont go bankrupt we will see if its a economicaly sensible solution in coming years
This made me think a lot more than I was expecting. Thank you!
This is great. Thank you 😊
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.
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
woaw nice video, really interesting subject!!
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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.
CSP power would be an excellent architecture for space based solar.
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.
Cool! I like this approach! 😎👍
@@johans634 Obama tried to make cool clean and was getting some success till politics got in his way. Problem bigger than all but economics drive it not always real cost. You can examine that geopolitical effect hinder some solution and aid others we get an interesting mix in outcome
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.
Battery progress is currently very fast.
It’ll probably be normal panels plus batteries for storage that give cities solar power at night
No its not fast at all, study basic physics and you will understand that battery tech is the most expensive way to store energy, it's about 10,000 more expensive than energy found in a gallon of fuel. Tesla Wall battery for 10KWhr(e) about $10,000 check in your local Tesla dealer. One plastic bucket for $1 can hold 1 gallon of any fuel worth 30KWh(ch) or also worth about 10KWhr(e) in a thermal power plant. Even better, uranium has about 1Million times more energy density than even chemical energy. If a battery could store energy a few times more denser, it would become close enought to being chemical fuel energy.
Also US energy use per capita is 300GJ/yr. Each solar panle makes about 1GJe/yr with a battery. See Wikipedia for per capita energy use.
@@johnjakson444 The economics of energy cost gets complex. What about the huge *ongoing* externalized environmental costs of fossil fuel included? Subsidies? Burning gasoline to make kinetic energy is about as inefficient as one can get especially the common internal combustion engine. ICE at best 30% efficient in normal consumer vehicle and likely down to a pathetic 20% of energy makes it to the wheels.
That ultra-refined gasoline doesn't show up by magic ready to use at local gas station either. It took a hell of a lot of energy and money to drill miles into the Earth's crust to get at it. Then have to refine it and the distribute a heavy liquid around. See amount of electricity needed to refine one gallon of gasoline may be in for a surprise. Now the economics of gasoline don't look so good does it?
Sure, a battery takes effort to build but a battery can be re-used over and over for many thousands of cycles in an EV, then it can be used for many thousands of cycles in less demanding grid applications. Look at the cost cumulative joules of energy across that lifetime versus one-time burn of gasoline before needing to go back to the drill, refine, distribute cycle. All the elements in a battery are still in it at end of life as at beginning. So it can be recycled, and the materials made available in recycling stream is going to be cheaper than going back to mine it.
Also, electrical based energy can almost directly harness the free fusion power from the sky, 173,000-terawatts non-stop. The raw inputs of sunlight and wind arrive freely, and they cannot be blockaded, sanctioned or taxed.
@@johnjakson444 Also, only around 0.7-percent of the US lower 48's 3-million square miles covered in current generation photovoltaics is enough to power the US 4200TWh annual grid. But why would we stop there?
Більш того, накопичувальні батареї можна встановлювати в приватних домоволодіннях та надавати можливість заряджати їх за зниженою вартістю, для того щоб споживати у час коли немає сонячної генерації.
Batteries are not cost effective though.
Thanks for the invention
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.
Video was great.
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.
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.
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.
The thing with mirrors is the correct angle of the sun's rays can be a pain in the ass
@@jabmd2nd Plus neighbors may make modify if reflected energy accidentally heats their place to much Los Angeles Music center comes to mind so place becomes an issue no rare birds no neighbors?
Maybe. But I bet that a combination of three $1 a piece light sensors and a 50 cent microcontroller per mirror, that problem can be easily solved.
so 1, is our South Australian CSP still working? 2 will it be revamped into a more efficient/reliable form?
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.
Any updates on the CO2 battery from Energy Dome? This seemed like a viable energy storage solution.
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.
Is it possible to one side of solar cells while other side of panel mirrors are fitted? With automation, panels sides cane be changed to generate energy for storage. Hope get some view on this idea.
Theoretically could be possible and would be good for land management! But the technical and practical challenges would be great: with finding the right alignment and flipping them around, possible heat management and so on...🌛
There are BESS battery energy storage systems which can store excess energy during the day from PV generation just like the molten salt case
It requires large spaces, which makes it impractical.
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?
@@YoJesusMorales In small scale can work but few worked out them lasting beyond 25 years. Energy companies like 100 years lifetimes but seldom get that
I wonder if you build csp in a urban area, does the temperature go down during the summer?
It looks quite pretty at dusk, like a lighthouse.
In another news, yet another cutting-edge power-generation technology that's basically just some fancy way to boil water.
Nuclear power plants are also "just some fancy way to boil water" if you will.
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.
Hey, is there a way the same solar panel to absorb and reflect light so that both CSP and SPV can co-exist together?
CSP and SPV have different operating principles so not on a same panel/ mirror. But they could be integrated at the system level in a complimentary manner like we pointed out in the video. ☀️
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.
Pumped hydro works day and night. Just ask N Portugal.
But you can't do pumped hydro everywhere. Good luck trying in England, the Netherlands, Poland or northern Germany. Also batteries are now getting really cheap and building pumped hydro is quite expensive and has a big impact on the local environment.
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
I don’t know if you should call the storage part in renewables „niche“
oooh, love this
Thanks!
You bet! 🌤️
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.
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..
Battery storage will continue to ramp as well as PV, it’s a match made in heaven.
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.
To store heat you never want to use even electrical energy since when you get it back, you only get 1/3 of the value back.
Best source of heat for filling the salt tank storage is always cheap heat, preferasbly from fission heat. CSp and fusion heat are just vastly more complicated than fission.
@@johnjakson444 CSPs don't convert 100% of solar energy to stored heat. It's about 50% or less. Since the construction cost of a pv plant is much much cheaper than a CSP you can just use electricity to heat graphite and use turbine with efficiency of offer 50% to convert it back to electricity. You can even store the heat in natural gas burning plants and use the graphite heat instead of buying gas. CSPs are dead
Thx
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.
I prefer pumped storage hydroelectricity, but the more alternatives, the better!
Yes, especially because pumped hydro often comes with significant environmental and social impacts. It is also hard to find naturally suitable locations for those. We need more than that. 💧
I hope China's and Australia's CSPs will become successful examples in the upcoming future.
The solar power plants in Cities Skylines are CSPs!
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.
Also a big advantage is that it has a turbine. You need this for stabilizing the AC frequency.
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.
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!
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?
@@davidanalyst671 I’m from Nova Scotia Canada. Getting the tail end of Beryl right now. We get a lot of them, several a season
@@johnransom1146 There is always a solution to every issue. What drive this stuff truly.
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.
Huh. I didn’t realize how badly designed this type of power “generation” is. Thank you for explaining its huge faults. 😮
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?
Saw one at a distance before I knew about their existence. They are a really surreal thing to see.
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.
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
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.
If i understand it correctly, they complement esch other, csp bsnjs upon heat and pv consumes light wasting heat?
Bro this is the first time i see an expert with the same name as me lol
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 (?).
Reflect Orbital is also working on this issue. There are some really smart people there.
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.
Can the overproduced Energy not be stored as H2?
why not fill the tower with water to directly generate steam there . If it is possible. but then the night time problem will remain. both of the models can work i think .
Solar PV and CSP are great combination. The industrialised countries should also help low income countries towards smooth transition to alternative energy.
Interesting energy tech. Africa needs energy to grow
Thanks. I would've liked a bit more technical approach and viability/efficiency comparisons of technologies and solutions and required annual solar radiation per longitude. For example, at what cost these CSP facilities would be viable at what longitude? And could this technology enable renewable energy production (for export) in Africa? I guess we need CO2 sources for some of that. Yeah, when can we invade all deserts with renewable energy production :)
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.
Why they ignored that pv cells can charge batteries for use during night same like stored hot water in case of csp
So basically adding a battery?
Most benefit of CSP is high efficient compare photovoltaic. So it can be reduce temperatur average
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.
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.
now you are just making up science as you go, TEGs are expensive and very inefficient and require a far larger temp difference than what is available in the air.
Molten salt is storing high grade heat that was collected from the sun tower, when it is introduced to the generator station, there is possibly 500c of working temp difference
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
@@aaronparys1750 It takes one to work without a hitch or heck up or they stay with tried and true.
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.
CSP is much more effective if you need heat instead of electricity, be it for cooking or industrial processes.
Some really interesting comments in here! People with ideas and knowledge.
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.
More 15-20% of global emission