The Other Solar Power

by Deb Powers

Solar power brings to mind images of houses topped with solar panels, each house becoming its own little solar plant to transfer the light of the sun into electricity to power all of its appliances and needs. There's another kind of solar energy out there, though, and it looks like a good bet to take up a big chunk of the solar electricity generation market. If you haven't heard about solar thermal power, here's a quick primer and explanation of how it works.

Solar Thermal Power - The Other Solar Energy

Unlike photovoltaic power - solar energy transformed directly into electricity via specially coated panels, solar thermal energy, also called concentrated solar power, uses the sun's energy in a different way. At the world's largest (to date) concentrated solar power plant in Seville, Spain, for instance, giant mirrors focus the hat from the sun on a huge central tower full of water. The water boils, producing steam which turns turbines and generates enough electricity to power up to 10,000 homes.

CSP is being embraced by power companies, who see it as a way to mass produce energy for consumption and keep their hold on the energy market. A number of utility companies across the country and the world are investing in concentrated solar power plants and adding them to their portfolios. One of the more attractive aspects of CSP, though, is that it is scalable. While large, utility-scale concentrated solar plants can supply hundreds of megawatts of energy, smaller CSP installations are quite feasible and can be built on site to supply just the electricity needed locally.

Solar Power When the Sun Doesn't Shine

A recent development makes CSP even more attractive to the large utilities, which are starting to take the lead in solar power development. One of the major holdbacks in the adoption of solar power as a viable mass energy source is its unreliability. After all, when there is no sun shining, there's no energy to transform into electricity. One solution has been to store the electricity in batteries for later use, but the current technology for this is bulky, expensive - and creates the additional problem of battery disposal.

Newer solutions focus on storing the heat from the sun before it is turned into electricity - a much more efficient and economical method. There have been numerous substances tried to store that heat - water, oil, synthetic oil, and the latest - molten salt. Molten salt has demonstrated the capacity to store heat for hours, and release it n a controlled manner that can generate electricity for hours. Current installations can store enough heat to generate electricity for up to six hours after the sun goes down and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Labs are hoping to double that capacity soon. Once that milestone is reached, it will be possible to generate electricity round the clock through solar power.

 Learn More About Concentrated Solar Power (Solar Thermal)

Interested in learning more about solar thermal power? Here's a list of resources where you can read up and find out all that you want or need to know about what may be the most viable form of renewable energy in production.

• U.S Department of Energy: Concentrated Solar Power Basics
• Good/ Blogs: The Other Solar
• National Renewable Energy Labs: Concentrating Solar Power
• Solar Paces: CSP - How it Works

Photo Credit: alla-14 Stock.xchang