Since there's been so much talk of CSP (and thermal storage) lately, I thought I'd post a link to this article from RenewableEnergyWorld. The Only Way Is Up: CSP Builds Up Heat | Renewable Energy World
How about residential CSP? Place the panels upside down, say six feet high in the air with heat sinks on its back, and multiple mirrors below below in a crescent, say 4 groups, angled to concentrate reflected sunlight up INTO the suspended solar panel. Each group is optimized for a time period of the day, thus eliminating the need for a sun tracking system being a vampire drain. The ground-level mirrors are thus easy to clean, and the upside-down panel system remains clean-er than if it had been facing the sun and being rained upon. The CSP will detract spiders. Consider the cost of solar panels versus groups of mirrors. You could easily get 10x the amps out of regular solar panels. As a kid - with the Radio Shack solar kit - and a multimeter, I could see the difference outside, using a magnifying glass on the tiny solar panel. The volts & miliamps would jump when concentrated sunlight was placed over it. (not to a small dot though!) Only downside would be loss of land, unless you put it all on a roof, making cleaning of the mirrors hazardous. Remember the Mythbusters episode where they try to make a solar death ray? Imagine four of those, angled for four different time periods in the day, that you adjust every season. Parabolic solar ray gun a.k.a solar death ray
The 'vampire drain' of a tracking system should be less costly than the 'drain' of always having 75% of the mirrors out of commission.
CSP is pretty much a utility scale thing. It doesn't scale down to residential. There is concentrating PV, which may start appearing on rooftops, but you won't see CSP in the "hood" ever.
What about the cost of the tracking system? Residential CSP is all about being afordable. For the price of a 8 feet by 4 feet efficient solar panel, you can buy a gazillion mirrors. The infamous solar death ray, being parabolic, as the sun moves in a 2 hour period, the Large Bright Dot will move across the solar panel. Then having two more parabolics for other day periods, etc. The parabolic mirrors could be placed quite far away, or real close, making this flexible. Also I'm sure a dead simple mechanical tracking system could be devised cheaply, if it only needs to turn in one axis. My residential CSP is all about affordability, and that could be deployed in places like Haiti or Africa. Costs : 205 Watt Solar Panel 850$ + mounts for one panel. Wall / door mirrors go for 15$ ea at Target, I'm sure a wholesaler / glass store could be cheaper. Especially if you build a parabolic. Whole point being, even spending 500$ worth of mirrors + one 205w panel, you will get more Amps/Hours than buying two 205w panels. Battery storage is the deal killer. However, solar energy is great for reviving dead car batteries by pulsing the current in the opposite direction. So good for poor countries. In rich countries, feed back into the grid. However, heating water is probably a better use/cost ration for a family with kids in the sunbelt region. There too CSP with retail mirrors can help. People that install on roofs, need to know that they need to be cleaned, often, or else the amps go down. What a chore. I'd rather have a ground-based install, and simply wash the mirrors with a garden hose. - Don't ask me to build - I live way too far North in Canada to make such a system worthwhile with only 4-5 months of usable sunshine per year. - I wonder that if 4 wall mirrors, angled, into the cheapest solar array, say a 100w, if the output would not be greater than the single 205w one. In both cases, no tracking system. The engineer in me says yes. Commercial CSP is to me, a dream, because it cannot be placed everywhere on the planet. So there will never be hundreds of them.Near Las Vegas - say besides Boulder City - would be a perfect spot. The CSP would be a salt-based one, converting heat to steam, closed loop. I'm surprised the US isn't tapping (more) into ground sources, especially near Yellowstone, no sun required.
Those land masses to set up CSP are truely huge. A question should be asked if we want powerplants to take up 10 square miles? Although their are swaths of california, nm, and arizona that get lots of sun and might be used. So my question is, since I can't find it anywhere, how much does CSP cost versus PV per megawatt and will this drop enough in the next 10-20 years to be competitive with wind and biogas?
This link is excellent for explaining the financial situation of 1984. It almost worked then. Now the situation is vastly better. www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/pdfs/sand91_7014.pdf Actual, I would prefer that power plants take up 0 sq. anything. Otherwise I would rather have a power plant that takes up 10 square miles of desert instead of 1 square mile of strip mining of prime woodland in West Virginia. (Question--How much land is lost to road paving in the US every day? Is 10 sq. mile really that much once you know the previous number?) As for the cost per megawatt, the problems is not so much $$/MW but what is feasible in the 100s of MW range in terms of production capability. Thousands of sq. meters of mirrors is actually producible now. As equivalent production of PV modules.....for the same power output.....is a lot of waiting and more land area. And in the power plant business time waiting is money lost. Here is an link addressing the PV vs. CSP cost: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-ivanpah-the-worlds-most-efficient-solar-plant/
You're shopping at the wrong place: 205 Watt Solar Panel $344 Yeah, you still need to buy mounts and inverters, but your budget CSP doesn't include a sterling engine to convert all that heat into electricity.
