An energy storage pilot
project run by a Norwegian company at Masdar City could drive costs down for
the solar sector by 70 per cent over the next five years.
New Energy Storage
Technology (Nest) is testing its 1-megawatt concentrated solar power (CSP)
system at the Masdar Institute’s Beam Down facility, using a concrete mixture
to store energy rather than the usual, much more expensive, molten salt method.
There is an
international push to get the price of CSP down to 6 US cents per kilowatt hour
by 2020 from its current average of about 20 cents. In the UAE, this would put
the power generated from the technology at grid parity, or the same price as
power from natural gas. Another type of solar energy in the country, solar
photovoltaic (PV), has already reached grid parity at Dubai’s Mohammed bin
Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park project.
“We want to help make
CSP a leader [in power generation technology],” said Nicolas Calvet, the
chairman of the Masdar Institute
Solar Platform. He pointed out that since CSP is a newer technology, the sector
is still trying to increase its research and development efforts to drive down
costs. The price of components is the main obstacle, and energy storage is the
main piece of the category’s puzzle, making up about 20 per cent of the total
costs of a CSP plant.
Nest said its technology
could cut the cost of CSP energy storage systems by half.
The company developed
the prototype and pays for the operation of the system, while Masdar Institute
provides the infrastructure. Nest expects its technology to finish the testing
phase in October.
“Nest’s is the first
large-scale, pre-commercial-scale thermal energy storage system in the Middle
East,” Mr Calvet said.
Christian Thiel, the
Nest chief executive, said the storage system should reach commercial markets
in the fourth quarter once the pilot was validated.
“We see our system as a
revolutionising thermal battery with significant cost reduction,” he said.
The Abu Dhabi-based
International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has released a cost analysis of
various renewable energy technologies. It says the price of CSP plants is
dominated by the initial investment cost, or capital expenditure, which
accounts for about four-fifths of the total cost.
Mr. Thiel said the Nest
technology could cut capex requirements by 30 to 65 per cent.
Energy storage is one of
the biggest obstacles facing renewables as sources of power generation. PV does
not have energy storage capabilities, requiring the energy captured from the
sun during the day to be immediately fed into the grid. This can curb the use
of traditional forms of power generation such as natural gas, but only during
daytime hours.
CSP has an advantage in
that it is able to save the daytime solar energy to feed into the power grid at
night. The current form of storage most widely used for CSP applications is
molten salt.
Mr.Thiel explained that
molten salt, which stores the energy for later use, must maintain a temperature
above 275°C or it will crystallise. To do this requires using a constant source
of electricity. Switching to a cement source of storage such as Nest’s frees
that electricity to be sold instead, slashing operation costs by 50 to 75 per
cent.
The molten salt costs
US$500 to $1,000 per tonne, compared with the concrete mixture at $80 per
tonne.
Nest expects to break
even within two years of commercial operation. Its total investment so far has
been $10 million. The technology could be applied to new CSP plants or those
already built without storage units, such as Masdar’s 100MW CSP Shams 1 plant
in Abu Dhabi.
Mr Thiel said Nest’s
priority would be to build its storage units in the Middle East. “The
technology has been developed with the [Masdar] Institute, and having a project
[within Masdar] would be a nice development.”
“We have a good chance
to get our first contract signed by the end of this year, since customer
interest is already very high,” he said, adding that the
company was in advanced discussions with four potential clients. –End-
Image
by: The National
No comments:
Post a Comment