Carlos Marquez-Salazar from FC Business Intelligence talks about solar thermal technologies

BZE's Patrick Hearps and Matthew Wright speak to Carlos Marquez-Salazar, FC Business Intelligence, about the latest innovations in solar thermal technologies and the increasingly positive business case for solar thermal.

Carlos Marquez-Salazar interview

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Transcript

Patrick Hearps :Carlos, ok, thank you for being able to call in from so far away. So your currently in London, is that correct Carlos?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar : That is correct yes, it nearly midnight here. But i'm glad to be participating in this radio program.

Patrick Hearps : So Carlos, now you have done a report on concentrated solar power markets on parabolic troughs, with CSP today business intelligence. Is that correct?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: That is correct, yes.

Patrick Hearps : Ok, so I guess the first question that we usually ask our guests is what is your interest in renewable energy, and how do they get involved. Have you been doing research into concentrating solar thermal power for a while? Or is this a new pursuit?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Well I've been with been with CSP today for the last three years and the old mechanic renewable student where I was looking at what are the big issues, that I think humanity is facing now is how do you provide power in a sustainable way.

And then I started looking at renewable energy and I decided to write my dissertation on the renewable energy industry but I quickly became aware that it was to broad, so i looked at CSP, and i got in touch with CSP today and they eventually pointed me out in the direction of large scale concentrated solar power. So I wrote my dissertation on the competiveness of the Spanish concentrated solar power industry. And since then i have working with them. I have been involved in researching these days.

Patrick Hearps : Excellent. So we would like to talk a bit about a report that was put out recently, looking a next generation parabolic trough concentrating solar power. Now i guess listeners, regular listeners to the Beyond Zero show would be aware that we talk quite a bit about concentrating solar power its a very important, one of the very important technologies in renewable energy and there are plans right now, doing right around the clock power in Spain, which Matthew may be able to tell us about.

Now parabolic troughs are probably one of the more mature types of concentrating solar technology, potentially being overtaken by others. Carlos has done some research into some new improvements in that space. If you would like to just tell us a bit about those Carlos.

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Ok. The parabolic trough technology is the most established CSP technology, it's been around since the 1980's. And, certainly the only CSP technology that has stood the test of time. At least in the, full scale CSP plant. All other technologies haven't been around so long. And of course in that time there has been improvements to the technology.

I think that the two main improvements, and by the way, I'm not a CSP engineer, but I’m aware of these improvements, but bear in mind i might lack some of the technical substance that a CSP engineer could give you. But the improvements that we have identified in our research by speaking to industry experts, are improvement either in increasing the temperature of the CSP plant or the complexity of the plants.

So if you have by increasing the temperature, you automatically increase the amount of electricity that comes out of the plant. And they are looking at heat salt fluids. At the moment the heat fluids that are being used are, essentially they use synthetic oil to about 400 centigrade. Now there have been new heat transfer fluids that have been that i remember which had higher temperatures. There are also improvements like direct heat generation that do both things at he same time. They allow the operating temperature to be increased.

And as well, they decrease the complexity of the system by doing aware with, by operating without heat exchangers, obviously without heat transfer fluid, but by heat exchangers. But by heat exchangers in any power plant, in any thermal power plant, a large piece of the equipment is that if you can run a power plant without those, it brings cost savings and in these particular case, it also increases the temperature, increases the electricity that you can squeeze out of the plant.

Patrick Hearps : Excellent. So to re-cap there. So you have been looking at the different ways that parabolic trough, CSP plants are looking at reducing their costs through higher temperatures and avoiding some of the complexity of previous designs to eliminate expensive bits of equipment.

I guess a bit about how you are collecting this information. Are you constantly in contact with various representatives of the CSP industry around the world? Is that how it works?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Yes, that is right. We are constantly in touch with all the CSP companies and research centres. And especially for writing the CSP parabolic trough report, we interviewed them, and tried to get an idea of the main indicators of performance, of cost and performance that go into a CSP plant. But we are always in touch with the CSP industry and that’s where we get that information from.

Patrick Hearps : Excellent. I mean i am sure that listeners would be interested to hear a bit more about the various companies and the countries around the world, where it's being built because, unfortunately it's not yet Australia. What were some of the countries or the places that were looking at developing and building these next generation parabolic trough plants?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Well I think that any CSP development, at the moment, are concentrated in two main markets, Spain and the U.S.A. And the U.S.A is where it all started, about twenty years ago with the solar energy generating systems in the Mojave Desert.

And since then, also there was a period when no solar plants were built, but that’s where they started and then in Spain after the enactment of a feed in tariff many CSP plants have been installed, and companies and research centres have been developing a lot of new technologies and solutions, to essentially be able decreasing the levelized energy costs of CSP plants.

Patrick Hearps : Right and this is something that i would to get both you and probably Matthew to comment on well before we wrap up. You mentioned that recently there has been a boom in building concentrating solar plants. And in your report you did discuss those.

That scale of the industry is really helping to drive costs down just through things like mass manufacture of all the different components, instead of building one of plants they are now building so many that they can mass produce some of the parts that go into it and drive costs down like that, just like car manufacturing plants do. Is that one of the trends that you picked up?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Well the very start of it I think us the industry has more capacity, you will see decrease in costs coming from the economies of scale. That's the start of it, absolutely.

Patrick Hearps : Cool. Now we only have a couple of minutes to go hear. I was just wondering if Matthew is still on the line. Are you there Matthew?

Matthew Wright : Yeah.

Patrick Hearps : Ok so Matthew's currently in Spain right now and has been visiting solar plants. Do you have anything, any new observations to add from your experiences so far?

Matthew Wright : Yeah I had a discussion with the head of the European Solar Thermal Energy Association, Luis Crespo last night and he was interesting in future reductions in the cost of say para plants.

And if you think of the sea of mirrors like a forest, at the moment all the specifications for wind blowing for all of the mirrors are the same across the entire field, he was saying that it is only the outer mirrors needed to be able to width stand the highest winds and the inner mirrors can be made much cheaper. Also the actual tolerances of how accurately the mirrors.

Patrick Hearps : Matt, I think you are breaking up a bit there. Maybe it's the culmination of Skype and international phone call or however you have patched yourself in.

Matthew Wright : Ok we'll leave it there then.

Patrick Hearps : Cool alright are about to leave. Just as we finish up Carlos what are you going to be working on next for CSP today?

Carlos Marquez-Salazar: Well I think that we are looking at next will be the potential of storage technology. So the one thing that differentiates CSP from the other renewable competitors is the fact that it generates heat, when it is not used it is stored. Another implication is that, probably we don't have time to discuss now, but I suggest that you look into it...

Patrick Hearps : Cool alright well that's definitely something that we have talked a lot about on this program, so cheap storage from CSP, we're looking forward to hearing from you when it comes out. I'm sorry I'm going to have to cut you off Carlos, thank you very much for your time.