Concentrating Solar Power in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa: A Review of Development Issues and Potential to 2050

Abstract

This paper summarizes the findings of a study undertaken by the European Academies Science Advisory Council to evaluate the development challenges of concentrating solar power (CSP) and its consequent potential to contribute to low carbon electricity systems in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (the MENA region) to 2050. The study reviewed the current status and prospective developments of the four main CSP technology families, and identified prospective technical developments, quantifying anticipated efficiency improvements and cost reductions. Similarly, developments in thermal energy storage were evaluated, and the role and value of CSP storage in electricity systems were examined. A key conclusion was that as the share of intermittent renewables in an electricity system increases, so does the value of thermal energy storage in CSP plants. Looking ahead, the study concludes that CSP should be cost competitive with fossil-fired power generation at some point in the 2020’s provided that commercial deployment continues at an increasing rate, and through support mechanisms that incentivise technology development. Incentive schemes should reflect the real value of electricity to the system, and should ensure sufficient transparency of cost data that learning rates can be monitored. Key factors which will determine CSP’s contribution in Europe and the MENA region over the period to 2050 are generating costs, physical constraints on construction of new plants and transmission, and considerations of security of supply. The study makes recommendations to European and MENA region policy makers on how the associated issues should be addressed.

Concentrated Solar Power: Components and materials

“…One is cost reduction in every step of the manufacturing, installation and operation of the plants. This path can produce a series of gradual small improvements that by themselves are not sufficient to reach sufficient competitiveness [10]. The second path is development of higher performance solutions that will offer much higher conversion efficiency, such as new thermodynamic cycles, new HTF materials, etc.…”

A numerical investigation of gas-particle suspensions as heat transfer media for high-temperature concentrated solar power

“…An increase of the working-fluid temperature above 600°C enables the use of more efficient supercritical Rankine cycles. As a consequence, the thermal-to-electricity efficiency increases about 10% compared to a subcritical Rankine cycle [2,3]. Furthermore, to allow cost-effective and round-the-clock dispatchable electricity generation using CSP, such plants must incorporate thermal storage systems.…”

“…Furthermore, to allow cost-effective and round-the-clock dispatchable electricity generation using CSP, such plants must incorporate thermal storage systems. Several types of storage concepts have been developed, but their widespread adoption is at present limited by high costs [2].…”

“…Based on the review of prior work, the goals of this paper are: (1) to study the heat transfer in dense gas-particle systems to extract data for the development of heat-transfer correlations for CSP plants operating with a dense gas-particle suspension as HTM; (2) to investigate the relative importance of convection, conduction, and radiation heat transfer within the solid phase of the gas-particle suspension for different wall temperatures and particle diameters; and (3) to examine the local wall-to-suspension heat flux to determine the relative importance of wall-to-solid conduction heat flux, wall-to-gas conduction heat flux, as well as wall-to-solid radiation heat flux for different wall temperatures and particle diameters. To meet these goals, a detailed EulerEuler model for dense gas-particle systems was built on the open-source code OpenFOAM [40].…”

De-risking investment into concentrated solar power in North Africa: Impacts on the costs of electricity generation

“…By looking at four specific North African countries -Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia -and at a particular RES technology, namely CSP with thermal storage, which has already become a proven solar power technology for large-scale applications (Pitz-Paal et al, 2012) and the generation of semi-dispatchable electricity with a high capacity value 4 , we contribute to the existing literature on de-risking CSP in North Africa and set out to address the demand for further concrete case study analyses, both in the regional as well as the technological dimension, of perceived risks by RES investors (Schmidt, 2014). By investigating the current financing environment for CSP in the North African region we are addressing the following question within the frame of this research: What is the influence of different risk categories on the overall cost of capital for CSP?…”