Pathways to the use of concentrated solar heat for high temperature industrial processes

New analysis is presented identifying strong potential for Concentrating Solar Thermal technology (CST) to be a cost-effective contributor to future sources of net zero-emissions, high temperature industrial process heat relative to other emerging options. Nevertheless, significant further development of the technology is needed to realise this potential because the majority of previous investment in CST has targeted lower temperature applications in power generation, which employs different working fluids and typically operates at different scales. A comparison with the flame temperatures typically employed in current industrial processes, together with an allowance for thermal storage, suggests that receiver temperatures in the range of 1100 − 1500 °C will be needed to drive many current high-temperature industrial processes, which is far above the range of temperatures employed commercially and also above the range at which most pilot-scale work for CST has been undertaken to date. Technology development will therefore be needed to realise this potential, both for the solar thermal plant and for the industrial processing plant, since current reactors have been developed to utilise fossil fuels. More work is also needed to advance understanding of the best options with which to hybridise CST with another back-up energy source, such as hydrogen, since it is uneconomical to seek to manage seasonal variability with thermal storage alone.