At the Akshardham Temple, New Delhi, a Clique Solar Arun dish unit is supplying steam for cooking, with an output equivalent to 3,500 meals a day.

By Jason Deign

A growing number of niche CSP players are proving that industrial applications, rather than grid power, might be the best route forward for the industry.

The US developer GlassPoint, for example, became one of the first CSP operators to break into the Middle Eastern market thanks to its specialised design for enhanced oil recovery.

Rackam has pioneered the use of CSP for industrial applications in Canada, a market where grid-connected power plants would not be viable because of low direct normal irradiance.

And in India, where grid-scale CSP is still struggling to take off, smaller technology developers are quietly pushing ahead with projects focused on industrial applications such as water heating.

The CSP Today award nominee Clique Solar, for example, has developed a dish technology that acts as a solar boiler for process heating and cooling applications.

At the Akshardham Temple, New Delhi, a Clique Solar Arun dish unit is supplying steam for cooking, with an output equivalent to 3,500 meals a day.

“This project showcases the technical and commercial viability of solar thermal systems in community cooking and also puts the solar thermal R&D capability in India a notch ahead of the rest of the world,” notes Clique Solar in a written case study on the deployment.

Another company, Aspiration Energy, is also using CSP for water heating. It has won a contract to supply hot water for the automotive manufacturer Wheels India.

Solar water heating

Indeed, across India “the concept of solar water heating for industrial applications is catching up quite a bit,” observes Madhavan Nampoothiri, founder and director of RESolve Energy Consultants in Chennai.

There are a number of reasons why such deals are easier to secure than grid power contracts. The most obvious one is that the scale of plants used for commercial applications is usually much smaller than that required for power generation.

Akshardham, for instance, relies on just a single dish that occupies less than 10 square metres in ground area. Another point is that the temperatures needed for most industrial applications are well below the optimum levels sought in electricity production.

This means the plants are much easier and cheaper to design and build. “Our market covers industries with processes requiring heat in the range of 100 to 250°C,” says Ludvig Bellehumeur, director of business development at Rackam.

“This actually encompasses more industries than one would think, including breweries, dairies, food processing, pulp and paper, textiles, and many other kinds of light manufacturing.”

Last but not least, the fuel-intensive nature of many manufacturing processes can make it relatively easy to build a business case for CSP, even compared to potentially cheaper renewable energy sources such as PV or wind.

Wheels India, for instance, is paying Aspiration Energy out of the money it saves from not having to use furnace oil, which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates might amount to USD$74,000 a year.

“The savings on costs has been so significant that the company now plans to replicate solar water heating systems in plants across the country,” says the UNDP in an online report.

Cost differential

This cost differential compared to traditional fuels is also why there is growing interest in CSP for natural resources extraction, which is helping to drive the growth of markets such as Chile.

Given these benefits, and the fact that CSP still has difficulty competing effectively with PV for grid power, it is perhaps unsurprising that some observers believe industrial applications could be a sweet spot, if not a major focus, for the solar thermal industry going forward.
“It’s unlikely that industrial applications fully overtake electricity production as the driver for CSP, unless they tap into high-volume district heating and cooling,” says Matthew Feinstein of Lux Research.
“It is, however, possible that industrial applications ‘rescue’ CSP, which certainly isn’t thriving given the low cost of PV. The ability to store and deliver thermal energy is an important distinction for CSP.

“Most importantly, perhaps, CSP must prove that it can produce economically below the enormous project scale it has previously attempted; it must work at sizes in the ones and tens of megawatts, whereas it used to rely on projects in the hundreds of megawatts or gigawatt scale.”

Allan Curtis, principal engineer for energy services at Aurecon, a global power engineering and consulting company based in Australia, cautions that land use might be a barrier to CSP adoption in many industrial settings.

However, he adds: “CSP using molten salt as the heat transfer medium clearly has an economic advantage if significant storage quantities are required.

“With current proven or about-to-be-commercialised systems, this means that central receiver power tower systems would be favoured. With smaller storage quantities, then parabolic trough systems may well be an option.

“The challenge with central receiver systems is to get vendors interested in relatively small-scale power projects, from 10 to 50MW, typically.”