Power plant technology could cut the cost of solar power

UK researchers are helping design a power plant that could make generating heat and electricity using solar thermal energy cheaper.

Engineers from Cranfield University are involved in an EU-funded project to build a €22m (£19m) facility in Egypt that will provide electricity, heat and desalinated water to a new university campus.

The technology planned for the site could help to cut the cost of concentrated solar power (CSP) — which generates electricity from steam turbines using heat from the sun — by around five per cent for construction and five to 10 per cent for operation.

Research from the project could also help provide a clearer price comparison between CSP and photovoltaics (PV), at a time when plans for the world’s largest solar farm have recently been altered in favour of more PV for economic reasons.

The new system operates at much higher temperatures than existing models of CSP generation, using a single tank of molten salts to store the sun’s heat and use it to create steam, instead of two.

Cranfield’s engineers, led by Dr Chris Sansom (pictured above), will also help to design parabolic optical reflectors that require less glass than conventional designs and nano-devices for harvesting waste heat energy from the plant.

In conventional CSP plants, the hot salts would be stored in a storage tank and then pumped through a system to create steam for the turbines before reaching a second cold-storage tank. The new facility will instead feature a single tank with a steam-generating chamber inside it.