MIT Creating 24-Hour Solar Power on the Cheap?

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/08/02/285708/solar-for-vampires-mit-team-creating-low-cost-247-solar-power/

By Stephen Lacey on Aug 2, 2011 at 3:14 pm

Researchers at MIT are designing a new method of building concentrating solar power plants with thermal storage that they say could lower the cost of energy by 50% compared with existing technologies.

Last month, a 19.9 MW power-tower concentrating solar power plant in Spain became the first to generate electricity for 24 hours using molten-salt storage. But the cost of building that demonstration plant is higher than most CSP technologies – around $18 per watt, putting the cost of electricity somewhere around 30 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour.

The company developing the plant, Torresol, wasn’t building it to prove the design could be the cheapest. It was a demonstration plant to prove molten storage technology and allow the company to scale up a much larger plant. But it also showed that there’s still work to be done in order to bring down costs of concentrating solar power designs.

MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor Alexander Slocum – along with a group of other researchers – says he’s designed a new type of tank for molten salt storage that could reduce equipment needs, increase durability and ultimately reduce the cost of electricity being generated by a plant.


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