New Intl Consortium to Advance High-Tech Mirrors Used in Solar Plants

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), joined by partners at Sandia National Laboratories and the Australian Solar Thermal Research Institute, has announced the launch of the Heliostat Consortium (HelioCon): an international effort to drive down the cost of heliostats.

HelioCon seeks to emphasise the significance of heliostats as a key component of concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) technologies. CSP with low-cost thermal energy storage can be used either to produce dispatchable electricity or provide high-temperature heat to difficult-to-decarbonize industries, like cement, steel, and chemical production.

Heliostats track the sun in order to reflect sunlight to a receiver, where it can be stored as heat for long duration energy storage and converted into electricity. There can be more than 10,000 heliostats in a single CSP plant, representing 30%–50% of the cost of system construction and a primary driver of operations and maintenance costs.

DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) is working to lower heliostat costs, with a target of $50 per square meter, to reach its goal of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour for next-generation CSP plants, which incorporate thermal energy storage.

“The Heliostat Consortium will be a collective powerhouse that centralizes U.S. efforts to develop advanced heliostat technology for solar panels,” said Guangdong Zhu, HelioCon director and NREL senior researcher. “It will also leverage international expertise toward achieving DOE’s aggressive goals.”

As part of the strategic roadmap, HelioCon plans to develop standards, metrology, techno-economic analysis, and field deployment technologies to address heliostat costs. In addition, it seeks to increase domestic manufacturing of solar technologies and to bring more professionals into clean energy careers.

HelioCon is funded by SETO (Solar Energy Technologies Organisation). NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.