Liquid Metal Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)

There is an international effort focused on reducing the cost of concentrated solar power (CSP). The goal is to cut the cost by about half, so that it can compete directly with fossil fuels without subsidies. One of the central challenges in doing so is to increase the plant operating temperature so that the heat engine can operate at higher efficiency. Many efforts are focused on increasing the temperature to about 700-800C, to use a supercritical CO2 cycle as the heat engine. However, we are more interested in pushing the temperature beyond 1000C by using liquid metal as a heat transfer and storage fluid in an all ceramic or graphite containment infrastructure. One of our papers showed that this can lead to a major cost reduction, but we haven’t continued working on it due to a gap in funding.