FIT banding for concentrated solar thermal (electricity generating)?

[GavinA]

Just thinking aloud here, but being as there are now going to be a lot of huge roof spaces that we're not going to be able to fill with solar PV*, I'm wondering if any of them might be suitable for concentrated solar thermal installations instead. Before going off to suss out the technical feasibility of this though, I wondered if anyone could point me in the direction of anything that states what FIT rates (if any) would apply to concentrated solar thermal for electricity generation?

my thinking is going along the lines of a 50kW CST plant with hot salt thermal storage could potentially generate that 50kW until well into the evening with a larger collector area, and could therefore potentially generate double or triple the income for a nominally 50kW installation that a 50kW PV installation could.

any info appreciated.

[smegal]

Nowhere near enough beam irradiance.

[Ted]

Technology is not covered by FiTs or ROCs. You would be limited to whatever contract rate a supplier would be prepared to negotiate.

This is part of the problem with the incentive schemes - they do not (intentionally) include any scope to incentivise innovation.

[smegal]

Any chance for RHI for the thermal power?

[billi]

whats wrong with the  36.1 per kWh  for 10 kw PV on roofs ?

[Ted]

Any chance for RHI for the thermal power?

Not where the heat is only used to generate electricity.

From DECCs RHI doc:

Electricity generation
Heat which is used for the generation of electricity will not be eligible for the RHI, as this is a heat specific scheme not intended to support electricity generation. From the point at which the heat is metered for the purpose of calculating its RHI support it must not be used to generate electricity. This does not preclude heat capture in a CHP plant, for example, where the heat has been used to generate electricity but will then be used for other purposes.

[GavinA]

whats wrong with the  36.1 per kWh  for 10 kw PV on roofs ?

well, when you've got a 120m x 10m roof to play with like one of our potential customers has then a 10kWp system isn't really making the best use of the space, and a 50kW system would only use up about a fifth to a quarter of the roof.

Just having a bit of a think outside the box moment really, as I have easy access to people well qualified to design such systems if it were viable. Seems a crying shame to only do a quarter of the roof just because the government have never actually seen a farm / industrial area and think anything over 50kWp must have been ground mounted.

Will maybe go the more conventional route and have a chat with navitron about the thin film stuff they've just started selling then.

[GavinA]

Technology is not covered by FiTs or ROCs. You would be limited to whatever contract rate a supplier would be prepared to negotiate.

This is part of the problem with the incentive schemes - they do not (intentionally) include any scope to incentivise innovation.

fiddlesticks, that's what I feared the situation would be as I couldn't find anything about it anywhere.

[smegal]

Why not just take a lower FIT payment, surely you'd be able to work a pretty good deal to fill the entire space with modules, economies of scale and all that.

[GavinA]

Why not just take a lower FIT payment, surely you'd be able to work a pretty good deal to fill the entire space with modules, economies of scale and all that.

not really with the new fit bands, as the band for 50-150kWp is less than 60% of the rate for under 50kWp, so you'd need to install around 90kWp just to get the same actual level of income from the fit per year as with a 50kWp system, and while there are some economies of scale if you buy a 40ft container load from china, realistically it's not a vast amount different to buying a 20ft container load, which is just about viable for a 50kW system.

this is why this change is so utterly ridiculous. If they'd compromised as I believe lots of companies asked them to do, and dropped the rate for smaller systems at the same time as the bigger systems, but by something more realistic, then there'd not be such a huge artificial jump at 50kWp yet the same amount of money (or more) could have been saved overall. Instead we have a situation where systems upto 50kWp are left earning 10-15% returns for another 6 months, while larger systems are killed off entirely.

The other side of the coin being that the country will be left paying 30-40% more than it needed to for it's solar electricity, and as a result, generating 30-40% less than it could have for the same cost. Lunacy.

[smegal]

Ouch.

Would the business have a use for any heat, so install 50 kW of PV then some solar thermal when the RHI is announced? That said they'd need to use A LOT of heat to make use of the area you described.

[brackwell]

Am i right in thinking you can put 50Kw now and put the rest in next year?  Or at least make the paper work say that!  Or just limit it with the inverters to 50Kw.  More than one planning application.  Get another metered fitted for the "workshop" as you want to let it. Where there is a will there is a way.

Ken

[smegal]

There no way you can THROW something up before the 1st of Aug?

[GavinA]

There no way you can THROW something up before the 1st of Aug?

yedl are currently taking 45 working days to respond to g59 enquiries, plus upto 4 months to do the work needed, and planning permission would be needed so unfortunately no. I'd be tempted to just do it and go for retrospective planning if it weren't for the YEDL timescales (and it not being my cash to gamble with).

[wookey]

My understanding is that CSP is still quite expensive even if you put it up in Spain/North Africa (maybe half to 2/3rds the price of PV and 3 times the cost of conventional power or onshore wind). I assume it'd be rather worse this far north, prohibitively so, as I expect full-bore sunshine is more important for CSP than it is for PV, as you don't get any power out below a quite high threshold temp.

So whilst clearly the FIT changes around PV are stupid, and the technology-specific application of incentives is also anti-innovation, I'm not sure that the innovation of CSP in the UK is a particularly good/appropriate one. Happy to be proved wrong of course, as I reckon CSP is a really top plan and there should be a hell of a lot more of it in the world. I anywhere apart from Spain and California/Nevada doing anything about it?