The leading national laboratory of renewable energy of the USA (NREL) has published a report that this is very contradictory reviews of installations at the expense of concentrated solar power (or CSP technology – concentrated solar power).
We are talking about the Solar Two project, within which was built the solar power plant at Crescent Dunes. This unique structure, consisting of 10347 mirrors-heliostats mounted on the area of 647.5 hectares around 195-foot tower.
Mirror can change its position, concentrating the solar rays on the container with special salt solution in the upper part of the tower. As a result, the salt is heated to 575 °C, and the resulting heat can be stored for a long time (10 hours), and used to generate steam required to operate the generators.
However, in the process, CSP-installation, a number of serious problems. One of them is the death of a large number of birds accidentally fall into the range of the heliostats where they literally turn to ash.
Another, more serious problem is the leakage of the salt reservoir discovered in 2016 and is associated with errors in engineering calculations. Although much of the damage arose, the plant had to stop for eight months to determine the causes.
Summarized and performance. Instead of the planned 52% of the solar power plant showed an average power factor of only 20.3 percent.
Source — Scientific American