Technology Status - NET Nowak Energie & Technologie AG

CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER
A Brief History of Concentrating Solar Power
The idea for solar-powered steam engines originated in France in the 1860s,
and in the following two decades, solar-powered engines were constructed
and used for several applications. In the early 1900s, the first commercial
solar motor and a 45-kW sun-tracking parabolic trough plant were built in
Meadi, Egypt. These early designs were the basis for R&D in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, when solar-thermal plant projects were undertaken in a
number of industrialised nations, including the US, the former Soviet Union,
Japan, Spain and Italy. These plants, covering the whole spectrum of
available technology, failed to reach the desired performance levels, though
R&D continued improving technology and increasing system scale. However,
it was not until the development of power towers in the 1980s that the first
large-scale solar-thermal electric generators were built. Meanwhile, a series
of nine solar-electric generating stations were built in California’s Mojave
Desert.
Technology Status
Applications of concentrating solar power are now feasible from a few
kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts. Solar-thermal plants can function in
dispatchable, grid-connected markets or in distributed, stand-alone
applications. They are suitable for fossil-hybrid operation or can include
cost-effective thermal storage to meet dispatchability requirements.
Moreover, they can operate worldwide in regions having high direct normal
insolation * , including large areas of Africa, Australia, China, India, the
Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the South-western United States, and
Central and South America. “High direct normal insolation” means strong
sunlight where the atmosphere contains little water vapour, which tends to
diffuse the light. At present, Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology can
be exploited through three different systems: parabolic trough, parabolic
dish and power tower. All the CSP technologies rely on four basic elements:
concentrator, receiver, transport-storage and power conversion. The
concentrator captures and concentrates direct solar radiation, which is then
* The term "insolation" is a measurement reference to the degree of incoming solar radiation.
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