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Concentrating solar power lost the solar race long ago. But the Department of Energy still has big plans for the technology.
Hundreds of thousands of mirrors blanket the desert of the American West, strategically angled to catch the sun and bounce its intense heat back to a central point in the sky. Despite their monumental size and futuristic look, these projects are far more under-the-radar-than the acres of solar panels cropping up in communities around the country, simply because there are so few of them.
The technology is called concentrating solar power, and it’s not particularly popular. Of the thousands of big solar projects operating in the U.S. today, less than a dozen use it.
Concentrating solar power lags for many reasons: It remains much more expensive than installations that use solar panels, it can take up a lot of land, and it can fry birds that fly too close (a narrative that’s shadowed the industry and an issue it says it’s working to alleviate). Yet the government still has big aspirations for the technology.
To meet its climate goals and avert the catastrophe that comes with significant warming, the world must roll out renewable energy sources with unprecedented speed. But while the construction of solar and wind energy is surging, renewables still face two disadvantages that fossil fuels don't: They produce electricity under certain conditions, like when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. And there’s not a lot of research on them powering heavy industry, like cement and steel production.
That’s where concentrating solar power has an advantage. It has two big benefits that have long kept boosters invested in its success. First, concentrating solar power is usually constructed with built-in storage that's cheaper than large-scale batteries, so it can solve the intermittency challenges faced by other kinds of solar power. Plus, CSP can get super-hot — potentially hot enough for industrial processes like making cement. Taken together, those qualities allow the projects to function more like fossil fuel plants than fields of solar panels.
A few other carbon-free technologies — like nuclear power — are capable of doing much the same thing. The question is which technologies will be able to scale.
“We have goals of decarbonizing the entire energy sector, not just electricity, but the industrial sector as well, by 2050,” said Matthew Bauer, program manager for the concentrating solar-thermal power team at the Department of Energy’s Solar Technologies Office. “We think CSP is one of the most promising technologies to do that.”
In February, the Department of Energy broke ground in New Mexico on a project they see as a focal point for the future of CSP. It’s a bet that the technology can compete, despite past skepticism.
Concentrating solar plants can be built in different ways, but they’re basically engineered to bounce sun off mirrors to beam sunlight at a device called a receiver, which then heats up whatever medium is inside it. The heat can power a turbine or an engine to produce electricity. The higher the heat, the more electricity is produced and the lower the cost of producing it.
The CSP installation in New Mexico will look a lot like past projects, with a field of mirrors pointing towards a tall tower. But one element makes it particularly unique: big boxes of sand-like particles. When it’s completed next year, it will be the first known CSP project of its kind to use solid particles like sand or ceramics to transfer heat, according to Jeremy Sment, a mechanical engineer leading the team designing the project at Sandia National Laboratories.
For years, scientists sought a material that would get hot enough to improve CSP’s efficiency and costs. Past commercial CSP projects have topped out around 550 degrees Celsius. For this new project, which the Department of Energy calls “generation three,” the team is hoping to exceed 700 degrees C, and has tested the particles above 1000 degrees C, the temperature of volcanic magma.
Past projects have used oil and molten salt to absorb the sun’s heat and store it. But at blistering temperatures these materials decompose or are corrosive. In 2021, the Department of Energy decided particles were the most promising route to reach the super-hot temperatures required for efficient CSP. The team building the project considered using numerous types of particles, including red and white sand from Riyadh in Saudia Arabia and a titanium-based mineral called ilmenite. They settled on a manufactured particle from a Texas-based company, Carbo Ceramics. To build the project they need 120,000 kilograms of the stuff.
Engineers at Sandia are now working on the project’s other components. At the receiver, particles will fall like a curtain through a beam of sunlight. After they’re blasted with heat, gravity will carry them down the 175-foot tower, slowed down by obstacles that create a chute similar to a children’s marble run. They’ll offload thermal energy to “supercritical carbon dioxide” — CO2 in a fluid state — which could then power a turbine. For industrial applications, the system would be designed to allow particles to exchange heat with air or steam to heat a furnace or kiln. To store heat energy for later, the particles can be stowed in insulated steel bins within the tower until that heat is needed hours later.
The team expects construction to wrap up next year, with results for this phase of the project ready at the end of 2025. The project needs to show it can reach super-high temperatures, produce electricity using the supercritical CO2, and that it can store heat for hours, allowing the energy to be used when the sun isn’t shining.
By the Department of Energy’s technology pilot standards, the 1 megawatt project is big, but it's much smaller than most solar projects built to supply power to electric utilities and tiny compared to past CSP projects.
This could help tackle another of CSP's challenges: Projects have been uneconomic unless they’re huge. They require big plots of land and lots of money to get started. One of the most well-known CSP projects in the U.S., the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes, cost $1 billion and covers more than 1,600 acres in Nevada. “Nothing short of a home run is deployable — I can’t just put a solar tower on my rooftop,” said Sment.
Projects that use solar panels can be as small as the footprint of a home. Overall, they’re much easier to finance and build. That’s led to more projects, which creates efficiencies and lower costs. The DOE hopes its tests will show promise for smaller, easier to deploy CSP projects.
“That’s been one of the challenges, in my opinion, that’s faced CSP historically. The projects tended to be very large, one of a kind,” said Steve Schell, chief scientist at Heliogen, a Bill Gates-backed CSP startup that’s working on a different pilot with the Department of Energy.
Heliogen went public at the end of 2021 with a valuation of $2 billion. To overcome hesitancy about the price tags usually associated with CSP, the company is targeting modular projects focused on producing green hydrogen and industrial heat, aiming to replace the fossil fuels that usually power processes like cement-making.
For companies, the CSP business has historically been tough. Some U.S. CSP startups have gone out of business, or shifted their sights to projects abroad. Despite its splashy IPO, Heliogen’s shares are worth less than 25 cents today, down from over $15 at the end of 2021. In its most recent quarterly financial report, the company downgraded its expected 2022 revenue by $8- $11 million as it works to finalize deals with customers.
Bauer at the DOE thinks the government can make technologies like CSP less risky by investing in research that takes a longer view than the one afforded by markets. And as the grid needs more large-scale storage, the value for CSP may change.
Even if CSP never becomes a significant source of generation on the grid, supporters like Shannon Yee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has worked with DOE on solar technologies for years, say it could still find other potential applications in manufacturing, water treatment, or sanitation.
“We always seem to be so focused on generating electricity that we don't look at these other needs where concentrated solar may actually provide greater benefit,” said Yee. “Everything really needs sources of energy and heat. How do we do that better?”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.