By Scott Nguyen

7/11/09

The 2009 CSP Summit held in San Francisco on June 30-July 1st brought together over 400 entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and public officials.  The large turnout underscores the potential of concentrated solar power (CSP) as a viable alternative energy source. Though the term CSP includes concentrated PV technology, the CSP summit focused exclusively on concentrated solar thermal technology where solar radiation is used as a heat source to power conventional steam turbines.

CSP technology had pick up interest and momentum in recent years with a significant number of companies both small and large entering the space.  However the technology is capital intensive, and with project financing virtually non-existent because of the current economic recession, the pace has slowed considerably.   Though many power purchase agreements have been signed (over 5 GW in total) and more are under review, no new projects have broken ground in the US.

This is in stark contrast to the business environment in Spain where a feed-in tariff set by the government has created an artificial market for renewable energy.  Companies like Abengoa, Solar Mellinium, and SENER have taken advantage of the high guaranteed rate and have constructed multiple solar plants in Southern Spain.  Andersol 1, a 50 MW solar plant with 8 hours of molten salt thermal storage, became the first trough based plant in Europe to produce electricity in December of 2008.  Additional plants are under construction and should be operational by the and of the year.  US based Solar Reserve plans construction of a power tower based design also in Spain sometime next year.   The hope is that activity in the US will soon follow given the 30% tax credit and renewed focus in renewable energy by the new administration once project financing becomes available.

There were some cautionary signs though at the conference.  First, discussions on the cost of CSP technology either in terms of capital cost per watt or levelized cost were decidely vague.  Dan Barth from Friatec warned of “hidden costs”, lessons recently learned from his involvement in several FEED studies.  Second, though thermal storage was highlighted as a key component to handling the issue of solar intermittency and technical advances have been made, several executives from US based companies on one panel remarked that thermal storage would not be included in their initial plant design.  And finally, Ausra is now marketing it’s compact linear fresnel technology as a steam source for process heat applications, changing course from the earlier ambitious goal of being both a technology provider and plant developer.

The CSP industry is still in the early stages, and therefore expect much to happen between now and next year’s CSP summit.