SaurEnergy Explains-India’s CSP Plans, China’s CSP Progress

As India announced a 500 MW CSP project plan, China is fast completing a 700 MW CSP plant

Solar Thermal plants, a stop start technology for solar at scale is back in the news after SECI CMD RP Gupta announced plans for a 500 MW Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) tender by the end of the current financial year recently. The announcement has put the focus back on a solar based technology that has struggled to deliver, and consequently, scale up. However, it’s not all gloomy, as the news comes just when China (who else?) has just announced the largest ever Solar Thermal plant, with a rated capacity of 700 MW. The Chinese announcement comes even as the world’s largest Concentrated Solar Plant at Morocco, the 510 MW Noor Complex Solar Power plant, remains the only large scale CSP plant working. The Ivanpah plant in the US was shut down within a few years following multiple technical issues and underperformance.

Touted as the world’s largest solar thermal power plant in China’s Gansu province,  it comes with the world’s first twin-tower solar thermal plant design as a part of its clean energy complex consisting of solar, thermal and wind power plants. The 220 m towers will combined with the rest to produce over 1.8 billion kwh of electricity annually at the complex.

Covering an area of 800,000 m², the solar thermal project consists of technology only seen before in the United States in 2014, in the Mojave Desert. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (since shut) relies on an alternate method of harvesting the sun’s power that’s been steadily developing since the early 1980s.  Known as solar thermal of concentrated solar power (CSP), these systems rely on mirrors known as heliostats to bounce sunlight to a central gathering point. There, the concentrated beams heat a transfer fluid that in turn heats a working fluid. This fluid then evaporates and turns a steam turbine which generates electricity.

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The Chinese plant differentiates itself from the American plant by incorporating two towers, with mirrors made of special materials that are capable of reaching a staggering 94% reflection efficiency. With two towers, 30000 mirrors allow for an efficiency enhancement of close to 24%, according to plant project manager Wen Jianghong. Each tower stands at 200 meters tall, with the mirrors from each tower forming two large overlapping circles that focus sunlight onto each tower.

As for power storage, the plant makes use of non-standard molten salt power generation. The molten salt stored in the towers serves as a thermal battery, storing excess heat during the day whilst releasing it during the night to keep the generators running continuously.

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The dual-tower solar plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2024. Success here would certainly be a massive boost for CSP proponents, who have faced indifference in recent years as Solar PV prices dropped to levels where CSP was simply too expensive and complicated to be taken seriously, despite its inherent promise of RTC power.

With projects like these, China is currently set to reach its 1200GW renewable capacity goals by 2025, an impressive 5 years ahead of schedule.

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By Yash Singh