Re-Thinking Concentrating Solar Power With Thermal Energy Storage

New work from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) proposes a new kind of approach that radically differs from conventional CSP designs. Their idea is to shrink down the typical CSP plant size by 1000 times - from 100 MWe to 100 kWe - and use cheap materials and passive heat transfer mechanisms to reduce cost. At this small scale, they have designed a solar power tower with the entire system, including thermal energy storage and a power block, held on top of the tower.