They may look like bathroom mirrors and provide a great background for a selfie, but our solar thermal heliostat mirrors are hitting the world stage to help China meet its renewable energy targets.
picture of solar thermal technology
Sunny side-up: our solar thermal tech is making waves in China
They may look like bathroom mirrors and provide a great background for a selfie, but our solar thermal heliostat mirrors are hitting the world stage to help China meet its renewable energy targets.
We have announced a new partnership with Chinese company, Thermal Focus, to use our unique heliostat technology for concentrating solar thermal (CST) electricity generation in China. China aims to produce 1.4 GW of CST electricity generation by 2018, and 5 GW by 2020. This would double the world’s CST plants – that’s a whole lotta awesome looking mirrors making significant impacts to clean energy generation!
The heated facts about CST
Many people know about solar PV but when hearing about solar thermal, there’s often a few blank looks and scratching of heads. Here’s some important facts you should know if you want to wow your friends with large-scale solar power knowledge:
- Solar thermal technology uses a field of computer-controlled mirrors (heliostats) that accurately reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a receiver the size of a window on top of a tower.
- The concentrated sunlight may then be used to heat and store hot molten salt, which can generate superheated steam to drive a turbine for electricity generation.
- An advantage of this system is the very low cost of storing thermal energy, giving CST technology great potential for medium to large-scale solar power, even when the sun isn’t shining. So this means the power can be used through the day, and the night!
- A heliostat field can represent up to 40 per cent of the total plant cost so low cost, high precision heliostats are a crucial. Our unique design features smaller than conventional heliostats, and uses an advanced control system to get high performance from a cost-effective design.
This means that our partners can get more bang for their buck as our heliostat field design and software maximises how much heat the heliostat can capture, resulting in higher energy outputs.
Aussie tech, global impacts
Thermal Focus will be using our specialist heliostat hardware and software to commercialise our technology in China with a shared revenue stream back to Australia to fund what we do best, research!
CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Larry Marshall said he was proud of CSIRO Energy’s solar thermal technology team and their innovative science.
“Australia is a leader in clean energy technology and CSIRO’s partnership with China’s Thermal Focus takes our climate mitigation focus to a global stage,” Dr Marshall said.
“Through this collaboration and our continued solar research, we will be helping to generate cleaner energy, cost savings and technology export benefits for Australia; all lowering global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Our tech is not only shining the light on CST in China – we also have successful partnerships for heliostat commercialisation with Japan’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems, the Cyprus Institute, and Heliostat SA in Australia.
The announcement
It seemed apt to announce this milestone at the Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference at the Australian National University in Canberra this week. Thermal Focus joined our solar thermal team to celebrate this successful outcome and to wet the ink on the licensing agreement.
Wes Stein, Chief Research Scientist, signs the deal with CEO of Thermal-Focus, Wei Zhu
We were also joined by the CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), Ivor Frischknecht who described how ARENA’s investment in solar thermal research development over a number of years has enabled our technology to reach the point where it’s now being commercialised in international markets.
Mr Wei Zhu from Thermal Focus, is as excited as we are about the potential of solar thermal in China.
“CSIRO’s solar thermal expertise combined with China’s manufacturing capability will help expedite and deliver solar thermal as an important source of renewable energy in China, and help commercialise this technology on a much larger scale.”
So here’s three cheers to our Aussie tech continuing to make a global impact. The future for CST is looking bright.
Find out more about our solar thermal research or check out the drone footage of our CST research fields from the air
15th December 2016 at 10:12 am
An old adage in engineering circles is ” If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Congratulations on your achievement.
We know that energy cannot be created or destroyed.It is converted from one form to another. To achieve this involves costs and is usually achieved at great cost. Investment analysis is relied on to assess if the cost is justified. Included are opportunity costs. Is your research expenditure justified when it may be better utilised elsewhere.? You may care to advise your expenditure to date, expenditure to complete the process to marketing stage and expected returns. You may then provide an estimate of the production cost of power from your process and then compare it with the cost of coal fired power Coal fired power is not broke just because CSIRO, the ABC or popular opinion says it is.
I am still waiting for a scientific justification emanating from CSIRO to the accusation that it falsified temperature readings and used these spurious findings to justify its climate change conclusions.
Your call.
15th December 2016 at 9:46 am
Would be nice to see that fire up here as part of our commitment to jobs and growth, but how much payback time are we expected to have for the 60years of jobs and growth that already occurred with the coal industry, they grew pretty big infrastructure projects in that time. It might complement the coal fired power stations in a sounder way than wind does. It would mean 60 years of growth again if they did encourage power plants of this type to proliferate across the other regions on the continent.