Can Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology help industrial manufacturing facilities reduce their carbon footprints?
A recent report by Vox shines a light on what had until recently, been considered a somewhat defunct solar energy generation approach. Concentrated Solar Power is harnessed by fields of mirrors that focus the sun's rays on to towers that then use the heat to turn water into steam. The steam turns a turbine that generates electricity. In recent years, CSP technology has been losing ground in most of the world, according to the report, due to breakthroughs in solar panel design and fabrication that have brought the cost of such technologies to historic lows.
The report highlights a recent breakthrough by the company Heliogen that could reinvigorate the industry, however.
Rather than deploying massive arrays, as is commonly the case with CSP facilities, the company operates a series of smaller mirrored assemblies that make use of incredibly sophisticated calibration technologies to continually remain perfectly optimized with regards to their positions between the sun and the light receptors.
The breakthrough allows the company's smaller arrays to harness the power of the sun more efficiently and in doing so, generate more energy while also concentrating the collected light rays at significantly higher temperatures than might normally be the case.
The company can produce light that exceeds 1000 degrees Celsius, and Heliogen has plans to push this temperature range to 1,500 degrees Celsius. At these thresholds, the heat generated makes the technology industrially useful for refining chemicals and crucially, for manufacturing steel and cement, both of which require consistent exposure to high temperatures during manufacturing.
The industrial application of these approaches is still a way's off, but the idea could help to decarbonize the manufacture of two of the world's most necessarily (and carbon intensive) building materials.
3 Comments
This is fantastic news. I've always been skeptical of technological solutions to problems that are much easily handled by not creating the problem in the first place, ie, building pedestrian cities versus self driving cars. Here's another story that gives one hope.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/climate-solutions/israeli-startup-ubq-turning-trash-into-plastic-products/
That article is long on hype and short on hard questions like toxicity, pollution created by the process, recyclability, etc. Also effort should be focused on reducing the waste stream and using more biodegradable / compostable materials instead of plastics. As for garbage as a resource there is existing tech that burns it cleanly for energy generation.
I couldn't agree more. As I said, I'd much rather not create the problem in the first place by banning the use of petrochemical products in favor of biodegradable products. If we can't farm on a landfill in 20 years after it's filled, we shouldn't use the products that go into it in the first place. We might even stimulate a craft's revolution if we built things to last, but it will take a lot more creative thinking in the ruling class than we currently have.
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