Exponential growth in wind power and solar photovoltaics is no longer news, with each successive year seeing new industry announcements of record-breaking growth. While this has helped shift renewable energy from a niche product to an industrial-strength provider of energy, some critics of renewable energy continue to portray it as only a minor part of the solution to climate change. They have shifted their arguments from trying to marginalize renewable energy. Now they focus on asking just how much renewables can really deliver, plus the age-old question of the fluctuating nature of wind and sun.
While technologies such as harnessing tidal power are not yet ready for full-scale deployment globally, one new technology has emerged as a clear winner in the past couple of years. And it promises to provide more answers to those questions of scale and reliability.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is a rapidly developing renewable technology that employs hundreds of mirrors to concentrate the suns rays onto liquids to raise temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius. This in turn can generate electricity, with current CSP plants reaching sizes of over 250MW of power generation. That number is set to rise as larger plants and mature technology is installed.
The added benefit of CSP is that the heat produced can be stored for up to half a day with minimal energy loss, before being converted to electricity. So issues of daily fluctuation in demand for power can easily be addressed. Plus when combined with a hybrid system such as natural gas, then power can be available whenever the demand is there, with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.
But isn’t such cutting-edge technology prohibitively expensive? Not so, according to a recent report by the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association (ESTELA) and International Energy Agencies SolarPACES and Greenpeace.
It notes that CSP has taken off, with the industry turning over one billion dollars in 2008, and this amount is set to double in 2009. Current costs are estimated at 15cents/kWh with predictions down to 8cents/kWh in the most favorable circumstances. Projects under planning and development aim to add 7,000MW of CSP power in the US and 10,000MW in Spain.
Projections in the report estimate that with advanced industry development and high levels of energy efficiency, concentrated solar power could meet up to 7 percent of the world's power needs by 2030 and fully one quarter by 2050. That can translate into as many as 2 million jobs by 2050.
The Asia-Pacific region is ripe for deployment of such technology. Small-scale plants are currently being deployed in India, and the Chinese government is calling for 200MW of CSP in Mongolia, Xin Jiang & Tibet. The solar potential in most countries across the region is huge, as long as care is taken in selecting the right sites to deploy them[1].
Two factors will be key to ensuring that CSP takes off: the right policy environment, and the need for the private sector to step up.
Governments in industrialized countries need to ensure a high price for carbon, which will help ensure that electricity generated from coal takes into account the full cost of coal power, thus making CSP more competitive. And all governments need to legislate ambitious renewable energy targets, coupled with guaranteed long-term prices for renewable energy in the form of feed-in tariffs.
As for the private sector, one only needs to look to the recent market signals sent by Munich Re, the worlds largest re-insurance company. This German company is aiming to spur investment of 400billion euros to construct CSP plants in North Africa, with a goal of providing up to 15% of Europe’s electricity needs.
With such heavy-weights jumping in on CSP, those power utilities still investing heavily in coal-fired power clearly need to rethink their strategy. Massive growth in renewables coupled with massive projections for new coal-fired and nuclear power stations is not a smart long-term investment. In a carbon-constrained world, a sea of mirrors across the world’s sun belt generating reliable power with a free source of fuel will look like brilliant foresight in planning by today’s power companies. Contrast that with a sea of stranded investments in coal power plants no longer able to operate. Hopefully the choice is obvious.
At Greenpeace we specialize in focusing heat and light on the world’s biggest environmental threats. Light to illuminate both problems and solutions, and heat to spur action. Now CSP is also providing a major amount of heat and light, not just in the form of mirrors catching the sun’s rays.
Power utilities and investors take note.
Gavin Edwards is the Head of the Climate & Energy Campaign of Greenpeace International
[1] Editor’s note: it remains to be seen if the potential for CSP systems is true for tropical regions where clouds oftentimes lead to diffused sunlight conditions.