WASHINGTON DC – Concentrating solar power has had a hard time getting off the ground in the US, but that is not stopping the Department of Energy. The agency is in the middle of a $100 million program aimed at pushing the technology into the mainstream of the renewable energy revolution, and they are not stopping at power generation. Industrial decarbonization is also on the menu. That means more green hydrogen is in play, despite what the skeptics say.
Concentrating solar power plants are complex systems. Instead of using specialized materials to draw electricity from a solar panel, they deploy specialized mirrors to bounce solar energy from a wide field of points onto a much narrower field, where it heats a store of molten salt or a specialized oil.
The heated liquid can be piped to a generating station, where it boils water to produce steam to run a turbine and generate electricity, as in a conventional power plant. Or, the liquid can be used simply as heat to run industrial processes.
If that sounds expensive and laborious, it is. However, the payoff in terms of carbon-free power can be huge, partly due to the built-in energy storage angle. The Obama administration promoted concentrating solar power as the wave of the renewable energy future, citing its ability to deliver zero emission electricity on a 24/7 basis.
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