Molten Salts Can Melt Down the Price of Concentrating Solar Power-Plus-Storage Concentrating solar power (CSP) has long held promise as a renewable energy technology. CSP uses mirrors, or heliostats, to harness the power of the sun by heating and storing an inexpensive medium such as sand, rocks, or molten salt … [continued]
Researchers Seek To Lower Cost of Heliostats 50% and Jump-Start Manufacturing in the United States
A new Argonne study offers the most complete understanding yet of the costs of owning and operating a vehicle and how those costs vary by powertrain, from the conventional to the cutting-edge. Advanced vehicle technologies are sometimes more expensive to purchase than conventional technologies but often pay for themselves in reduced … [continued]
The promise of marine energy is seemingly boundless — and thanks to a recently upgraded tool powered by new high-resolution data sets, users can pinpoint promising sites. Developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) resource characterization team and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Water Power Technologies … [continued]
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $40 million to fund continuing research into perovskites, with much of the money going to facilities connected to a consortium led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The collaborative effort established at NREL two years ago called the U.S. Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium … [continued]
Years of out-of-the-box thinking have yielded a broad range of design concepts for the marine energy industry.
By Noël Bakhtian If you reflect on the immense contributions of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s 17 national laboratories to society since the 1930s, it’s easy to conjure up discoveries and capabilities related to the multibillion-dollar, world-class national user facilities spread across the county. But the true keystone to … [continued]
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) provides global leadership in fundamental wind energy science research, development, and validation activities that enable low-cost wind energy. The office pursues opportunities across all U.S. wind sectors — land-based utility-scale wind, offshore wind, distributed wind — as well as addressing market barriers and system integration
Suite of open-source, HPC-powered physics codes allows engineers to do everything but collect their mail inside a virtual wind power plant.
The days of over-designing and over-building solar power plants to make up for unforeseen generation losses are gone. This is largely thanks to the emerging solar strategy of pursuing every tenth of a percent of system performance by better understanding the impact of equipment specifications, plant monitoring, and maintenance on the Performance Ratio, and therefore on the bottom line.
