The SunShot National Laboratory Multiyear Partnership (SuNLaMP) funding program enables our country’s national laboratories to develop novel technologies for concentrating solar power (CSP) that will reduce the levelized cost of energy for electricity it generates to six cents per kilowatt-hour. SuNLaMP supports research and development into technologies that have the potential for lower cost, higher efficiency, and more reliable performance than existing commercial and near-commercial CSP systems. The work of the national laboratories continues to be instrumental in accelerating progress towards and addressing the most critical barriers to achieving the SunShot goals.
Additional SuNLaMP awards also go to teams working in photovoltaics, soft costs, systems integration, and technology to market research areas. Learn more about the SuNLaMP awards in other subprograms.
Approach
Projects funded under SuNLaMP for the concentrating solar power subprogram aim to improve the components of CSP systems, including:
- solar collectors, which capture sunlight and direct it to a receiver;
- receivers, which absorb the heat from the sunlight;
- power block systems, which convert the collected thermal energy into electricity; and
- thermal energy storage, which allows for the storing of heat energy as a reserve for use during times when the sun is not shining.
Objectives
These projects will work drastically reduce solar field installation time and costs by 50–75% from current state of the art, which will further reduce financing costs. They also aim to create cost effective, high-temperature receivers that maintain thermal efficiencies of greater than 90% and are highly reliable. In addition, research teams will work to increase net power conversion efficiency to more than 50% and utilize dry cooling, and improve thermal energy storage to reach new temperature records.
Awardees
Project: Fractal-Like Receiver Designs for High-Temperature High-Efficiency Operation
Location: Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
SunShot Award Amount: $882,232
Project Summary: This project designs, develops, and tests novel particle receivers with configurations that use light-trapping geometries. Particle receivers drop sand-like ceramic particles through a beam of concentrated sunlight atop a power tower. The particles absorb heat at temperatures near 800°C, then store the heat in an insulated container below the receiver. This thermal energy can be converted into electricity using a traditional power cycle at a later time. By capturing more sunlight, researchers increase the effective solar absorbance and efficiency of high-temperature particle receivers. Zig-zag release patterns and multi-drop curtain configurations will be compared to baseline planar curtain configurations.
Project: High-Temperature Particle Heat Exchanger for sCO2 Power Cycles
Location: Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
SunShot Award Amount: $4,586,967
Project Summary: This project is designing, developing, and testing a supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) heat exchanger that operates at temperatures higher than 720°C and record-high sCO2 pressures. In sCO2 heat exchangers, heat is transferred from hot particles to carbon dioxide, which expands in a turbine to generate electricity. Industry experience with similar heat exchangers is limited to lower pressures, lower temperatures, or alternative fluids like steam or water. Sandia is partnering with three experienced heat exchanger manufacturers to develop several designs that achieve both high performance and low cost. A prototype unit will be manufactured and tested to confirm key metrics for performance and cost.
Project: National Solar Thermal Test Facility Operations and Maintenance
Location: Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
SunShot Award Amount: $2,250,000
Project Summary: This project maintains the National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF), which provides the CSP industry with established test platforms and highly experienced researchers and technologists. The NSTTF allows for development, testing, and application of new concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies that are instrumental in advancing state-of-the-art technology. With expert staff ensuring safe and reliable operation, the NSTTF allows these technologies to form the foundation of the global CSP industry and continue to advance the technology to new levels of efficiency, higher temperatures, lower costs, lower risk, and higher reliability.
Project: Advanced Anti-Soiling Coatings for CSP Collector Mirrors and Heliostats
Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN
SunShot Award Amount: $2,800,000
Project Summary: This project addresses the need to further develop self-cleaning reflector coatings for solar collectors. When solar collectors get dirty, their ability to collect sunlight is diminished. Through field demonstrations at CSP test sites, researchers are investigating the efficacy and durability of superhydrophobic coatings that can provide anti-soiling capabilities for trough and heliostat mirrors. In order for the coating to be cost effective, the team is developing a low-cost, industry-standard spray coat technique to apply the anti-soiling coating.
Project: Lifetime Model Development for Supercritical CO2 CSP Systems
Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN
SunShot Award Amount: $2,175,000
Project Summary: This project seeks to develop a predictive lifetime model for materials in supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) conditions similar to concentrated solar power (CSP) applications. Experimental work will generate relevant corrosion, creep, and fatigue data to populate the model and then verify model predictions. The test campaign will mirror the thermal cycling expected in CSP applications. The combination of experiments aims to remove the many unknowns of how sCO2 and its containment material will function over the expected lifetime of a power plant.
Project: High Temperature Heat Pipe Receiver for Parabolic Trough Collectors
Location: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM
SunShot Award Amount: $3,000,000
Project Summary: This project, done in partnership with Norwich Technologies, focuses on the development of heat pipe receiver technology for use with parabolic trough collectors. Heat pipe receivers are where the boiling and condensing of a fluid efficiently absorbs the incident concentrated solar energy and transfers the heat to the thermal energy storage system. The lab is combining its expertise in high temperature heat pipes and optically selective glass coatings with Norwich Technologies’ expertise in design, construction, and characterization of high temperature cavity receivers. The resulting technology will reduce the levelized cost of energy through a reduction in system costs, parasitic loads and a net energy conversion efficiency increase.
Project: Binary Metal Chalcogenides for High Temperature Thermal Storage
Location: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM
SunShot Award Amount: $3,450,000
Project Summary: Under this project, researchers are developing a thermochemical energy storage system that uses binary metal chalcogenides in a modular reactor operating at temperatures of at least 750°C. The proposed chemical cycle stores energy through the heat-driven decomposition of a metal chalcogenide and releases energy by recombining the chemical elements. Because of the cycle’s high energy density, this material holds promise for low-cost, high-temperature thermal energy storage.
Project: CSP Systems Analysis
Location: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO
SunShot Award Amount: $2,249,897
Project Summary: This project supports the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) core capabilities in concentrating solar power (CSP) systems analysis, including upgrades to NREL’s System Advisor Model (SAM), market analysis of CSP technologies, and cost benchmarking of CSP components. SAM is a performance and financial model designed to facilitate decision making for people involved in the renewable energy industry. The SAM tool will also be upgraded to facilitate the technoeconomic analysis of state-of-the-art CSP technologies currently under development by the SunShot Initiative subprogram as well as others in the CSP community.
Project: Concurrent Optimization of Component Capital Cost and Expected Operations and Management
Location: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO
SunShot Award Amount: $3,000,000
Project Summary: This project is developing and validating an open source modeling and simulation tool that optimizes the design and operation for concentrating solar power (CSP) plants by characterizing and forecasting operations and maintenance costs, component failure behavior, and the impact of design and maintenance policies. In addition, researchers will develop detailed performance and cost models leveraging the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s System Advisor Model (SAM), which is a performance and financial model designed to facilitate decision making for people involved in the renewable energy industry. These models will maximize profit through thermal storage dispatch optimization and will account for forecast uncertainty, heliostat and receiver stochastic degradation and failure, and O&M costs including steam turbine service.
Project: Refractory Solar Selective Coatings
Location: Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL
SunShot Award Amount: $3,605,721
Project Summary: This project is developing high-performance, solar selective coatings for power tower receivers in concentrated solar power (CSP) plants. In CSP tower systems, the receiver is where the reflected light is concentrated and converted to thermal energy. The efficiency of the light-to-heat conversion is an essential factor in determining the overall efficiency of a CSP plant. A reliable and durable solar selective coating can significantly improve efficiency by reducing the amount of light that is re-emitted away from the plant.