NREL and Alcoa have installed an Alcoa-designed concentrating solar power parabolic trough at NREL’s test facility in Golden, Colorado. The series of tests will measure the 20ft by 46ft collector’s efficiency to generate energy and evaluate its structural performance. This round of validation at NREL follows tests at Alcoa Technical Center outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Concentrating solar power systems installed to date use glass mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto receivers that collect the solar energy and convert it to heat. This thermal energy can then be used to produce utility scale electricity via a steam turbine.
Instead of glass mirrors, the Alcoa system uses highly-reflective aluminum mirrors, which are environmentally-friendly than fragile glass-based mirrors. The Alcoa design system enables manufacturing techniques to lower installation costs, plus its monolithic structure enables a simple ‘drop-in-place’ collector for easy installation. The Alcoa design includes sheet, extrusions and fasteners, the company said.
Eric Winter, director of development laboratories at Alcoa, said: “We understand the end-customers’ need to lower the capital investment in these systems in order to lower the cost of energy. After listening to numerous industry experts, our multi-faceted team combined its materials knowledge with design, manufacturing and engineered finishes capabilities to develop a system solution that enables manufacturers to more easily scale up to meet the growing demand for this solar technology.”
One of the benefits of concentrating solar power technology is that thermal energy can be stored and drawn upon during short periods of clouds and at night. Therefore, the technology provides grid stability and increased capacity factors compared to photovoltaic applications.
The project is being partially funded by a $2.1m DOE grant. Test results are expected by the second quarter of 2010, after which the system will enter its next level of large-scale testing.
