The Department of Energy commenced construction of a third-generation concentrating solar-thermal power plant as part of a $100 million pilot research project at Sandia National Laboratories’ campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The $25 million Generation 3 CSP facility aims to demonstrate that its energy storage technology can preserve and deploy 1 gigawatt of power for an hour, the agency said Friday.
Sandia is primarily responsible for building and operating the CSP plant at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility. It teamed up with researchers in Saudi Arabia and Australia to test variants of the system’s critical components.
The pilot project, whose completion is expected in 2024, will work toward achieving particle-based CSP energy-plus-storage at the price of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.
“This pilot facility will demonstrate how CSP systems can meet the challenges of providing long-duration energy storage while reducing costs and complexity for solar thermal technology,” said Alejandro Moreno, DOE’s acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. “At the same time, it also provides a pathway to commercialization for industrial process heat.”
