Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change much. Same with parabolic pipe plants.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream: for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.
No. The issue is solar panels getting much cheaper. The advantage of solar thermic plants are low cost of panels in exchange for more difficulty to maintain. This stops making sense when solar panels become dirt cheap and they cannot shift their power generation outside of peak solar(easily possible with molten salt tanks for the night, but not free)
Didn’t this exact plant go bankrupt due to solar panels being so much more efficient?
It would make sense.
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change much. Same with parabolic pipe plants.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream: for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.
Here is a paper I found about this stuff.
That’s actually very cool. There’s a lot of talk of molten salt energy storage anyway, and this just integrates it.
Maybe it could be built closer to other renewables or cities, and use a big vat to store heat from other power sources, when needed.
…Still, though.
AFAIK, the (silver?) mirrors on mounted servos that have to be kept clean are a pretty significant fixed cost.
There are hundreds of these.
No. The issue is solar panels getting much cheaper. The advantage of solar thermic plants are low cost of panels in exchange for more difficulty to maintain. This stops making sense when solar panels become dirt cheap and they cannot shift their power generation outside of peak solar(easily possible with molten salt tanks for the night, but not free)