Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Concentrated solar power (CSP)
This technology uses various techniques to focus the sun's rays onto a liq-
uid that is heated up enough to boil water and produce turbine-spinning
steam in the usual way. It typically utilizes reflective dishes or troughs that
focus the sun's rays on a single point to get maximum heat.
The process is simpler than solar PV, but the process of collecting the
sunshine has to be done in quite extensive sun farms, comparable to wind
farms. Desert areas are therefore the most appropriate. In the Mojave
desert in the southwest United States, CSP has been produced since the
1980s, with arrays of parabolic mirrors used to heat up troughs of liquid.
More recently, in Europe, a different CSP design has been tried out - that
of solar “power towers”. In 2007, the first solar tower started operation
near Seville. It consists of several hundred mirrors placed in a circle
around a tower so that they all reflect sunlight at a single point at the top
of the tower. This concentrated sunlight turns water into steam and so
drives an electricity-generating turbine. However, this spectacular power
An array of solar mirrors directly concentrates the sun's energy on the boiler
atop a power tower in the Mojave Desert.
