Policies to keep and expand the option of concentrating solar power for dispatchable renewable electricity

Abstract

To curtail climate change to less than 2°C global average warming, it is essential to eliminate CO2 from the electricity sector by mid-century. This requirement for rapid change means that the carrying pillars of the electricity transition must be technologies already available for widespread deployment. Few, if any, disagree that wind and solar power must and will shoulder most of the future power generation burden . Since both solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power are intermittent sources, finding ways to store large amounts of electricity has emerged as a crucial challenge for power sector decarbonization. Both wind power and PV would need to rely on a separate storage system, such as batteries. Concentrating solar power (CSP), in contrast, offers the possibility of integrated thermal storage and is able to store energy collected during day and use it for generation at a later time, including after sunsetdown. As thermal storage allows a CSP station to operate at a higher capacity factor, adding storage increases dispatchability but adds little or nothing to the levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) compared to a plant with no storage. In addition to this hybridization with stored energy carriers (today fossil fuels or biomass, in future other renewables) allows CSP to achieve the same value and capacity credit as conventional fossil power plants. This makes CSP a valuable option for producing dispatchable renewable electricity, both for bulk power and especially for balancing other, intermittent renewable sources.