Energy Department to Fund Projects Integrating Solar with Fossil Fuel Plants

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

December 17, 2012 | 5:35 PM

The PS10 solar tower plant sits at Sanlucar la Mayor outside Seville, Spain. The solar tower plant, the first commercial solar tower in the world, by the Spanish company Solucar (Abengoa), can provide electricity for up to 6,000 homes.

The Department of Energy has announced $20 million dollars to fund two to four projects combining solar power with existing fossil fuel plants. The hybrid power plants will use “concentrating solar power” to help generate electricity and reduce harmful air emissions. Concentrating solar power uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on a collector, which turns the heat into steam, powering turbines. The DOE hopes the projects will spur new innovation in solar hybrid power plants, and make the technology more affordable.

“The new funding announced today strives to overcome near-term market and technological barriers for cost-effective CSP hybrid system implementation. Additionally, CSP hybrid technology may help enable further cost reductions in stand-alone CSP projects and spur innovations across the broader concentrating solar power supply chain. The projects selected for funding under this program will work to design, build, and test cost-competitive integrated CSP-fossil fuel power generating systems.”

Spain has been the world’s leader in developing CSP plants. Stand-alone concentrating solar plants in the U.S. have created some controversy lately due to uncertainty over whether local municipalities experience net revenue gains or losses.