With the joint support of ARENA (Australian Renewable Energy Agency), the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, a part of the Australian government, and local power giant AGL Energy, a pilot project will be established in the northwest region of Victoria to test a "concentrating and hydropower" heat storage" technology.
On Thursday, the technology's owner, RayGen Resources, said it had received $3 million in funding from ARENA to build a pilot project to test its technical and commercial viability. The flagship project is also supported by AGL Energy, a major power generation and sales company in Australia. It provides 4MW of solar power and 17 hours of energy storage (3MW of thermal storage power, totaling 50MWh of thermal storage) for the local grid. Continuously provide clean electricity every hour and improve grid reliability.
The power grid in the West Murray area where the project is located is fragile. It once cut off half of the power generation of five local photovoltaic power stations at one time. In addition, more than ten photovoltaic projects have been warned that there is a risk of delay in commissioning and grid-connection applications. When completed, the pilot project will also provide synchronous power to the local grid.
Rid Payne, CEO of RayGen, said in a joint statement with ARENA: “Our company’s flagship project (4M/50MWh) has a very low cost of storage at a fraction of the current cost of battery storage. The project is located in a renewable energy development This is the third funding RayGen has received from federal agencies such as ARENA in nearly four years. . This funding will help the project to finally complete the financing and further meet the conditions for start-up, and is expected to be completed in 2021. The inventor of the technology is Dr.John Lasich, founder of RayGen, who pioneered the combination of low-cost heliostats and state-of-the-art gallium arsenide photovoltaic cell technology to generate electricity and heat at the same time. The light field works similarly to conventional CSP technology, with heliostats with day-by-day tracking devices that reflect and concentrate sunlight onto the top of the tower. But the later part is different. A very high-efficiency photovoltaic cell is placed on the top of the tower, which can directly convert light energy into electricity, and at the same time use water to cool the battery, which indirectly produces hot water.
"Australia's grid needs cost-effective energy storage solutions that can provide energy storage capacity for hours, days or even weeks. RayGen's innovative solar + energy storage products can use heliostats to capture light energy and convert it to energy. Stored in water. Our technology can provide a steady stream of clean electricity at a low cost, while also conserving natural resources and protecting our environment.”
The heat storage technology is based on the temperature difference between two pools - the "hot pool" and the "cold pool". The heat generated by the photovoltaic cells at the top of the tower is injected into a "hot pool", and the electricity generated by the photovoltaic cells is used to cool another "cold pool" through an electric refrigerator.
The temperature difference between the two pools generates electricity through a synchronous heat engine (organic Rankine cycle), which can achieve a charge-discharge efficiency of 70%, which can be deeply discharged, and the heat storage medium (water) has zero degradation during recycling. Finally, there is an additional benefit, which can be used for farming and animal husbandry in the light field.
Darren Miller, CEO of ARENA, also expressed great support for this: "The RayGen project shows us that through the innovation of local companies in photovoltaic technology, we have found a new solution to achieve dispatchable clean energy. Although this project The working mode of the solar thermal storage power station is similar to the previous photovoltaic power station + pumped storage, but its advantage is that it can be applied on a small scale, and the absolute cost is much lower than the latter. Thanks to our funding, RayGen will continue to advance The project, which is expected to start before the end of this year, has proven the technology to be more cost-effective than battery storage and pumped hydro.”
RayGen's solar technology is an innovative tower solar power generation technology that integrates solar thermal power generation and photovoltaic power generation, called CSPV. Like the common tower technology, it uses heliostats to reflect sunlight to the collector tower to generate high-temperature heat energy, with a concentration multiple of 750 times.
RayGen's CSPV technology integrates two different solar power generation technologies, avoiding the high cost of CSP technology and achieving stable and adjustable power output. Its overall system deployment is extremely simple. The heat collection tower and the energy storage system are combined into a container-type device, which can be deployed directly at the project site. That's it. This greatly simplifies the installation process and difficulty.
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