Solar Thermal Systems

Solar Thermal Systems

Parabolic troughs, like these used in Colorado, concentrate the sun's energy to great temperatures.There are two types of solar thermal systems: passive and active. A passive system requires no equipment, like when heat builds up inside your car when it's left parked in the sun. An active system requires some way to absorb and collect solar radiation and then store it.

Solar thermal power plants are active systems, and while there are a few types, there are a few basic similarities: Mirrors reflect and concentrate sunlight, and receivers collect that solar energy and convert it into heat energy. A generator can then be used to produce electricity from this heat energy.

The most common type of solar thermal power plants, including those plants in California's Mojave Desert, use a parabolic trough design to collect the sun's radiation. These collectors are known as linear concentrator systems, and the largest are able to generate 80 megawatts of electricity [source: U.S. Department of Energy]. They are shaped like a half-pipe you'd see used for snowboarding or skateboarding, and have linear, parabolic-shaped reflectors covered with more than 900,000 mirrors that are north-south aligned and able to pivot to follow the sun as it moves east to west during the day. Because of its shape, this type of plant can reach operating temperatures of about 750 degrees F (400 degrees C), concentrating the sun's rays at 30 to 100 times their normal intensity onto heat-transfer-fluid or water/steam filled pipes [source: Energy Information Administration]. The hot fluid is used to produce steam, and the steam then spins a turbine that powers a generator to make electricity.

While parabolic trough designs can run at full power as solar energy plants, they're more often used as a solar and fossil fuel hybrid, adding fossil fuel capability as backup.

Solar power tower systems are another type of solar thermal system. Power towers rely on thousands of heliostats, which are large, flat sun-tracking mirrors, to focus and concentrate the sun's radiation onto a single tower-mounted receiver. Like parabolic troughs, heat-transfer fluid or water/steam is heated in the receiver (power towers, though, are able to concentrate the sun's energy as much as 1,500 times), eventually converted to steam and used to produce electricity with a turbine and generator.

Power tower designs are still in development but could one day be realized as grid-connected power plants producing about 200 megawatts of electricity per tower.

A third system is the solar dish/engine. Compared to the parabolic trough and power towers, dish systems are small producers (about 3 to 25 kilowatts). There are two main components: the solar concentrator (the dish) and the power conversion unit (the engine/generator). The dish is pointed at and tracks the sun and collects solar energy; it's able to concentrate that energy by about 2,000 times. A thermal receiver, a series of tubes filled with a cooling fluid (such as hydrogen or helium), sits between the dish and the engine. It absorbs the concentrated solar energy from the dish, converts it to heat and sends that heat to the engine where it becomes electricity.