Power Tower Technology Roadmap and cost reduction plan.

Technical Report · Fri Apr 01 04:00:00 EDT 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1011644· OSTI ID:1011644

Mancini, Thomas R; Gary, Jesse A ^[1]; Kolb, Gregory J; Ho, Clifford Kuofei

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1. U.S. Department of Energy

Concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies continue to mature and are being deployed worldwide. Power towers will likely play an essential role in the future development of CSP due to their potential to provide dispatchable solar electricity at a low cost. This Power Tower Technology Roadmap has been developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to describe the current technology, the improvement opportunities that exist for the technology, and the specific activities needed to reach the DOE programmatic target of providing competitively-priced electricity in the intermediate and baseload power markets by 2020. As a first step in developing this roadmap, a Power Tower Roadmap Workshop that included the tower industry, national laboratories, and DOE was held in March 2010. A number of technology improvement opportunities (TIOs) were identified at this workshop and separated into four categories associated with power tower subsystems: solar collector field, solar receiver, thermal energy storage, and power block/balance of plant. In this roadmap, the TIOs associated with power tower technologies are identified along with their respective impacts on the cost of delivered electricity. In addition, development timelines and estimated budgets to achieve cost reduction goals are presented. The roadmap does not present a single path for achieving these goals, but rather provides a process for evaluating a set of options from which DOE and industry can select to accelerate power tower R&D, cost reductions, and commercial deployment.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1011644
• Report Number(s): SAND2011-2419
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY
ELECTRICITY
ENERGY STORAGE
SOLAR COLLECTORS
SOLAR RECEIVERS
TARGETS