Concentrating Solar Power

• Main Authors: Loomis, James (Author), Weinstein, Lee Adragon (Contributor), Bhatia, Bikramjit S (Contributor), Bierman, David Matthew (Contributor), Wang, Evelyn (Contributor), Chen, Gang (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society (ACS), 2017-01-17T20:42:59Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Solar energy is a bountiful renewable energy resource: the energy in the sunlight that reaches Earth in an hour exceeds the energy consumed by all of humanity in a year. While the phrase "solar energy conversion" probably brings photovoltaic (PV) cells to mind first, PV is not the only option for generating electricity from sunlight. Another promising technology for solar energy conversion is solar-thermal conversion, commonly referred to as concentrating solar power (CSP). The first utility-scale CSP plants were constructed in the 1980s, but in the two decades that followed, CSP saw little expansion. More recent years, however, have seen a CSP renaissance due to unprecedented growth in the adoption of CSP. Photographs of two operating CSP plants, a parabolic trough collector plant and a central receiver (or "power tower"), are shown in Figure 1.
United States. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Awards DE-AR0000471 and DE-AR0000181)
United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Science (Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center. Award DE-SC0001299/DE-FG02-09ER46577)
United States. Department of Energy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (Award DE-EE0005806)
MIT & Masdar Institute Cooperative Program