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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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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.