Energy provision is a big challenge for our Society, being the present production/consumption paradigm not sustainable. To change current trends, a large increase in the share of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) is crucial.
The evolution towards a society not based on fossil fuels has become a matter of the greatest interest, and solar energy has the potential of providing 27% of global electricity in 2050 – above all others RESs – of which around 11% from Concentrated Solar Power (CSP).
CSP systems have the distinctive ability of providing dispatchable power: State-of-the-Art (SoA) CSP plants featuring Thermal Energy Storage (TES) run overnight or with cloudy sky, providing renewable base–load generation and ancillary services aiding the penetration of intermittent sources such as wind and solar PV. Still, deployment lags behind expectations and technology breakthroughs are needed in order to significantly reduce costs.
Most notably, TES options working at temperatures exceeding 700 C still need to be developed.
GLASUNTES aims at bridging this gap by achieving three main objectives, i.e. to prove the feasibility and assess the potential of
1. an innovative CSP concept whereby (i) the receiver is co-located with the TES vessel, and (ii) the solar radiation is directly absorbed by the liquid storage medium;
2. the adoption of common glass-forming compounds as novel TES materials. These are nontoxic and inexpensive (mainly sand), and the related know-how is already available from the glass manufacturing field;
3. the CSP systems resulting from the integration between receiver–TES and recently proposed high-performance power conversion units based on supercritical CO2 thermodynamic cycles.
The project successfully demonstrated that common glass in molten state can be effectively use to directly capture and store concentrated solar energy at temperature above 1000 C. During the experimental campaign glass temperatures as high as 1300 C were reached.
