SwRI awarded US $4,9 million grant by the US DoE to develop CSP technology

The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been awarded a US $4.9 million grant by the US Department of Energy (DoE) to manufacture and test certain components for CSP plants.

According to a press release issued by the SwRI, the funds are part of “a $9.9 million continuation contract to manufacture and test a high-efficiency supercritical CO2 (sCO2) hot gas turbo-expander and compact heat exchangers for CSP plants.”

The award was given through the DoE’s SunShot Initiative as part of a long-term project that looks into new sCO2 expander designs. During the second stage of the project, the SwRI will lead a team of companies involved, including Aramco Services Company, Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corporation, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), General Electric and Thar Energy.

“Over the last two years, SwRI and its industry collaborators have developed a highly efficient, multi-stage axial flow sCO2 hot gas turbo-expander that advances the state of the art from laboratory size to a full mega-watt scale prototype,” said Dr. Jeff Moore, manager of the Rotating Machinery Dynamics Section of SwRI’s Mechanical Engineering Division, and principal investigator of the project.

The project also aims “to optimize novel compact heat exchangers for sCO2 applications to drastically reduce manufacturing costs. The scalable sCO2 expander design and improved heat exchanger will close two critical technology gaps and potentially provide a major pathway to achieve power at $0.06 per kilowatt hour.”

Furthermore, it would lead to an “energy conversion efficiency of more than 50 % and a potential total power block cost to below $1,200 per kilowatt installed,” as said by the SwRI.

The project, which will be conducted in two phases, began in late December 2014 and will continue through mid-2016.

Even at $10/barrel, oil can’t match solar on cost, says the National Bank of Abu Dhabi

A report commissioned by the National Bank of Abu Dhabi last week states that fossil fuels can no longer compete with solar technologies on price, and forecasts that “the vast bulk of the US $48 trillion needed to meet global power demand over the next two decades will come from renewables.”

Under the title Financing the Future of Energy. The opportunity for the Gulf’s financial services sector, and co-authored by the University of Cambridge and PwC in collaboration with Masdar, the paper says that “while oil and gas has underpinned almost all energy investments until now, future investment will be almost entirely in renewable energy sources.”

“Cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables,” the 80-page NBAD report says.

Similarly, the report highlights many longer term investment opportunities, particularly storage technologies and CSP. It says these technologies are currently running behind solar PV and on-shore wind in the maturity curve but are rapidly catching up. “They can already be seen to be following a similar path towards proven deployment and operation, reliability and falling costs,” it notes.

The report also notes that energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly obvious investment, with five-year returns in many investments.

Installed CSP capacity now over 4,5 GW

The March 2015 edition of the CSP Quarterly Update is now available and it examines which markets have shown the most amount of growth over the past three months and what to expect from them in the coming quarter.

It has 37 pages of data rich analysis and includes 39 tables and figures. It is now available from: https://secure.csptoday.com/research/quarterly-purchase.php

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CSP Today is the reference point for CSP professionals. We provide business intelligence to the industry with focused news, events, reports, updates and information for the Concentrated Solar Thermal Power industry in markets such as India, South Africa, Spain, USA, Chile and the MENA region.

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Developed directly from primary data listed on the CSP Today Global Tracker, this data based analysis of the industry is the perfect tool to further understand global market developments. The goal of the update is to provide clients with a succinct, informative and detailed breakdown of the biggest events in the past quarter. To achieve this we compare major CSP markets, highlighting which areas have experienced the greatest change over the past quarter and what this means for the industry going forward.

The March 2015 edition of the CSP Today Quarterly Update delves into the latest developments since December 2014. Currently there are 30 CSP-active markets listed on the CSP Today Global Tracker. Of these, 13 markets experienced significant changes over the past quarter – all of which are discussed in this edition.