Demonstrations for promising Solar Thermal technologies

Solar Thermal technology can become competitive when deployed through large capacity plants because of higher conversion efficiency of turbine generator plants coupled with higher thermodynamic efficiency when energy is available at high temperatures as well as cheaper thermal energy storage. More importantly this technology can be indigenous with much higher level of value addition within the country as compared to photovoltaics. Also the time is not too far away when we would need to see solar energy not just as a source of electricity but also a non-fossil primary energy source to produce other forms of energy carriers to cater to different energy use segments.

I am glad that the efforts to create MW scale demonstrations in this area that are necessary before decisions to take up large scale projects in solar thermal area are bearing fruits.

ONGC energy centre trust and BARC with partial financial support from MNRE, are setting up a 2 MWe solar thermal plant. The facility has heliostats reflecting sunlight to a tower that supports a hyperbolic mirror to reflect the light back to a furnace located on the ground. While in this project steam would be raised to run a turbine to generate electricity, the furnace on the ground can in future be also used for thermal splitting of water to produce hydrogen. Efforts to develop technology for water splitting are separately being pursued.

In another development that is being done between IIT Bomaby and NETRA-NTPC, a 3.5 MWe solar thermal plant that would run on 24×7 basis using CLFR and solar tower with thermal storage would be progressively developed. The idea is to demonstrate continuously running power generation plant using thermal storage that is expected to be more cost competitive.   

I believe that these technologies would prove to be highly relevant to India’s energy development plans in the long term.