CSP Around The World

At the end of 2019 there were 120 CSP plants in operation in 19 countries giving a total installed capacity of 6.1 GW. The majority of the plants installed since 2006 have incorporated two tank molten salt thermal energy storage.

Countries with high solar resources and growing energy demand have led the way with CSP. The USA is home to the first commercial CSP plants, as well as some recent ‘first of a kind’ tower systems. Spain began a resurgence of CSP uptake from 2006. Morocco, South Africa, Chile and India have all progressed. China is a recent entrant with several new plants.

The positive track record of parabolic trough systems partly explains why to this day 4.7 out of 6.1 GW of globally operating CSP plants are based on this technology. However, tower systems offer higher temperature energy collection directly to molten salt, leading to more efficient power generation and more cost effective storage of energy.

Solar tower technology has had a shorter demonstration period at the commercial scale. The first utility-scale tower plants were direct steam generating plants built in Spain after 2007 while the first molten salt tower system was built in 2011. Both the steam‑based and the molten-salt based plants have been operating reliably since their completion.

The NOOR III plant in Morocco, the largest molten salt tower plant built to date (150 MW), has been exceeding its performance targets.

The good track record of tower plants together with a more efficient way to obtain large energy storage has seen a growing share of new CSP systems adopting this technology.

To date, the global installed capacity of operational molten salt tower plants is around 600 MWe and more facilities continue to be developed and constructed.

SPAIN

In Spain, favourable policies introduced in 2007 enabled the rapid development of a leading CSP industry in a short period of time. By 2013, a total of 2.3 GW of CSP plants were installed, employing a workforce ofa round 20,000 professionals. During this period, Spain built the first commercial CSP tower plant with molten salt storage, the 20 MW Gemasolar plant in Seville. Spain remains as the international CSP leader for accumulated deployment representing a third of the global capacity with 2300 MW. Currently there are a total of 50 plants under operation. Consistent levels of generation have been achieved year on year and 2.7% of the Spanish electricity demand is covered by CSP plants. Spain currently has a total of 5200 professionals employed in the CSP industry. This has renewed their interest in the technology, with 5 GW of capacity envisaged in the 2021–2030 National Energy and Climate Plan that they recently submitted to the European Union.

USA

The USA pioneered the CSP industry with the world’s first Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) plants in the late 1980s.
These plants were enabled by favourable policy measures. As incentives ceased in the early 1990s, CSP developments came to a standstill and did not resume until the construction of the Nevada Solar One plant, which completed construction in 2007. In 2011, new measures, including loan guarantees for renewable projects, were introduced. As a result of these measures, the USA now represents the second largest market in terms of total installed capacity with 1745 MW. In 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility a 392 MW power tower plant was completed. Furthermore, since 2014,
the world’s biggest parabolic trough plant, Solana, is under operation with a capacity of 280 MW. The most recently completed plant in the USA, the Crescent Dunes 100 MW molten salt tower system in Nevada, is still working through commissioning.

CHINA

China has a target of 50% renewable electricity generation by 2050. On top of consistent development of wind and solar PV, a “pilot program” for solar thermal projects was announced in 2017 with a total of 20 projects and 1.35 GW of capacity. By the end of 2018, three plants were successfully connected to the grid: Delingha 50 MW trough, Delingha 50 MW molten salt tower and Shouhang Dunhuang 100 MW salt tower. One year later, four more plants completed commissioning, for an additional 200 MW of capacity. This corresponded to half of the world’s newly-built CSP capacity in 2019. Three quarters of the total installed CSP capacity consists of tower power plants, the rest being shared between parabolic trough and Fresnel technologies. Beyond this initial pilot program, China has suggested longer term plans for around 30 GW of CSP by 2030.

MOROCCO

Morocco’s implementation of CSP began with a 20 MW trough based Integrated Solar Combined Cycle project that has been operational at Ain Beni Mathar since 2008. Morocco has now announced plans to develop 2000 MW of solar energy projects, both PV and CSP, across five different sites. The biggest project so far is the Noor Project and it was completed in 3 stages: Noor I, Noor II and Noor III. Located near Ouarzazate, the Noor complex has a total CSP capacity of 510 MW. Noor I is a 160 MW trough plant with 3 hours storage, Noor II is a 200 MW trough plant with 7 hours storage and Noor III a 150 MW molten salt tower system with 7 hours storage. Noor III is the largest CSP tower molten salt plant in the world to
date and has been performing well since commissioning.

CHILE

Chile has been experiencing an energy crisis, with high electricity costs that represent a hurdle for economic growth and investments, especially for energy intensive sectors like the mining industry. A significant slice of the mining activity is carried out in the northern part of the country, a desert area that also has the highest DNI resources on the planet. In this area, there is a pipeline of 9 CSP projects in the planning phase and one plant at an advanced stage of construction known as Cerro Dominador. The unit is a tower molten salt plant with a gross capacity of 110 MW and 17.5 hours of storage. This will be the first CSP system in South America. The Chilean Ministry of Energy has also developed a Chile CSP roadmap that includes plans to establish a 1 GW solar park that is intended to include six 100 MW tower systems.

UAE

Renewable energy has become economically attractive in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE). Inaugurated in the UAE in 2013, 100 MW Shams is one of the largest CSP plants in the world. Recently, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) selected Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power and China’s Shanghai Electric to build a 700 MW plant (600 MW trough with 10 hours of storage and 100 MW tower with 15 hours of storage) providing more than three times the capacity of the initial plans. The project is set to break a number of records in the CSP industry, including the largest molten salt storage system and the tallest receiver tower. Under the terms of the contract, the new plant will deliver energy at US$0.073 per kWh which will make this a benchmark project in the world in terms of cost of generation.