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Total installed costs for both PTC and ST plants are dominated by the cost of the components that make up the solar field. It is likely that all new CSP projects developed worldwide will include thermal storage. Commissioned in 2021, the Cerro Dominador 110 MW ST project, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, features a storage capacity of 17.5 hours.
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In 2020, the 150 MW of newly-commissioned capacity in China had a weighted average storage capacity of 11 hours. For STs, that value increased from 5 hours in the 2010 to 2014 period to 7.7 hours in the 2015 to 2019 period (a 53% increase). The average thermal storage capacity for PTC plants in the IRENA Renewable Cost Database increased from 3.3 hours between 20 to 6.1 hours between 20 (an 84% increase). Adding this is now a cost-effective way to raise capacity factors, while it also contributes to a lower LCOE and greater flexibility in dispatch, over the day. Since 2015, however, hardly any projects have been built or planned without thermal energy storage. In the early years of CSP plant development, adding thermal energy storage was often uneconomic and generally unwarranted, so its use was limited. For example, Spain plans to add 5 GW and Italy 880 MW of new CSP capacity by 2030. National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) of some EU Member States show and indication of the potential development of the CSP project pipeline in the future. In addition to this, a 300 MW project is planned to come online in 2025 in Qinghai, China.
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Botswana’s Ministry of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security has initiated a pre-qualification process for participation in a 200 MW CSP tender, while Namibia has announced plans to launch a CSP tender in 2022 for between 50 MW and 130 MW of CSP capacity. The CSP project pipeline includes a 100 MW solar tower project with 12 hours of storage expected to come online by 2024 in SouthĪfrica. Spain has launched an auction that includes 200 MW of CSP capacity, but the results are yet to be announced. The outlook for 2022/2023 is somewhat brighter, however, with the possibility that close to 1.4 GW of new capacity could be commissioned in China and the United Arab Emirates. Developers have struggled and some projects have been lagging, while others have found new developers and some projects appear unlikely to be completed. Yet, progress on China’s policy to build-out 20 commercial-scale plants to scale up a variety of technological solutions, develop supply chains and gain operating experience has proved more challenging than anticipated. The sector was optimistic that China’s plans to scale up the technology domestically would provide a boost to the industry and take deployment to new levels. This puts the cumulative global installed capacity of CSP at the end of 2021 at around 6.4 GW. At the same time, about 265 MW from the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) plant in the USA – in operation since the late 1980s – was retired. Hopes for growth in 2021 did not materialise, though 110 MW (all from the Cerro Dominador project) was commissioned during that year in Chile. In 2020, only 150 MW was commissioned globally, with all of this this coming online in China. Yet, compared to other renewable power generation technologies, new capacity additions overall remained relatively low, at 860 MW per year in 2018 and 550 MW in 2019. In those years, an increasing number of projects came online in China, Morocco and South Africa. Breaking the last five years of this down, after modest activity in 20 – with annual additions hovering around 100 megawatts (MW) per year – the global market for Concentrated Solar Power grew in 20. Cumulative CSP installed capacity grew just over five-fold, globally, between 20, reaching around 6.5 gigawatts (GW) by the end of that period.