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and you have to replace it with something," he said. Last week, the CSIRO's Renewable Energy Storage Roadmap report indicated the National Electricity Market (which is all of Australia except NT and WA) could require a 10- to 14-fold increase in its electricity storage capacity between 2025 and 2050.Īt the moment, the power we use at night mostly comes from coal- and gas-fired generation, said Dominic Zaal, director of the Australian Solar Thermal Research Institute within the CSIRO. It comes at a higher price because it's got this added value and complexity. "It's generation you can have when you need it at night, or peak periods. "The whole point about CSP is that it's dispatchable renewable generation," Dr Lovegrove said. This combination of generation and storage makes CSP "dispatchable", meaning the power can be sent to the grid when it's needed. When the Sun goes down, this stored heat can be tapped to drive the turbine and generate electricity. The heat from the Sun is stored in a medium such as molten salt. "China is the most active place at this, at this very moment," Dr Lovegrove said.ĬSP cannot generate daytime electricity as cheaply as solar PV, but it has one advantage: built-in storage. Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Israel and other countries are using CSP in their grids, while China has dozens of projects underway. "We've actually managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory a couple of times."Īs of 2021, the global installed capacity of CSP was 6.8 gigawatts, which was many hundreds of times less than the figure for photovoltaics.īut CSP is not dead. The CSIRO's Renewable Energy Storage Roadmap, released last week, predicts that by 2050, CSP will be the cheapest way to store energy for 8–24 hours.ĭeveloping this "medium-duration" storage is a necessary step to switching off coal- and gas-fired generators that produce most of the power we use at night.įor this reason, CSP projects are starting to gather momentum. The reason for this boils down to three words that describe one of the major challenges of decarbonising the grid: overnight energy storage. Recently, however, it's been making a quiet comeback. While CSP was once the great hope for replacing coal and gas-fired generation, it's now generally considered to have been eclipsed by cheaper forms of renewable generation, like solar panels and wind turbines. LoadingĬoncentrated solar power (CSP) uses mirrors to focus heat from the Sun to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. There was a time, not long ago, when the future of electricity generation looked something like the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049, with endless arrays of mirrors in concentric circles.