SOLWARIS project has been presented at Solar Paces 2019 conference that took place on October 1-4, 2019, in Daegu, South Korea.
The debate of the conference was mainly around technologies and ecomonical progress as well as the future of the CSP technologies. According to José Luis Martínez Dalmau, president of ESTELA, the strong decline of RES (renewable Energy Company) prices made the policy makers see the costs of the electrical system as the main driver for decarbonization, leaving a bit aside the political commitment to it. In terms of LCoE, RES including CSP, are already competitive against fossil power generation.
At the moment RES gained weight in the energy mix, the lowest LCoE (as sole decisive criterion for technology choices) lost momentum, as it excludes externalities whose costs can be higher than the LCoE itself. Moreover, the need for storage, for network reinforcements, increased curtailments result today in having no longer LCoE, but flexibility in the focus.
By the end of 2018, the current storage capacity of CSP plants exceeded more than 10 times the capacity of all batteries connected to the network worldwide. This mature technology, of great capacity in terms of volume of energy and power of delivery, has demonstrated its reliability. This is a clear opportunity for solar thermal technology with storage. In countries with good DNI, CSP plants with storage will provide the best complement to PV for meeting the demand after sunset and contribute to increasing firmness of the back-up capacity thanks to its manageability.