It’s an easily forgotten necessity of energy production: the billions of cubic meters (BCM) of freshwater that is necessary for cooling, irrigating, fracking, and other uses. This is water that is not returned to the water basin for future use — it’s temporarily lost to evaporation, consumption, or pollution. The … [continued]
As you may have noticed in the story on the huge NREL study just published showing that 80% of US electricity could easily come from renewable sources, concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) would play a big part in that. But would such clean technology run into problematic material constraints? … [continued]
The concentrated solar power (aka concentrating solar power) market will continue to grow, even in the midst of solar PV’s rapid cost reductions. According to the latest reports, China is projected to have 1,000 MW (or 1 GW) of concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) capacity by 2015 and 3 … [continued]
Earlier this month, New York Times reporter Matt Wald had a piece on the role of energy storage in supporting the expansion of renewable energy. However, his specific focus on solar thermal power generation overlooks the potentially high costs of relying on solar thermal power and also overlooks the potential for distributed “storehousing” of renewable energy. […]
Concentrating solar thermal power has promised big additions to renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy storage. But with significant water consumption in desert locations, is the energy storage benefit of concentrating solar enough to compete with the dramatically falling cost of solar PV?
Concentrating solar has promised big additions to renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy storage – saving sun power for nighttime – but there’s a catch. Most of the new power plants are big water users despite being planned for desert locations.
