Noor I, II, and III (Image)

2018 marks a historically significant milestone for a solar technology that runs day or night.

At 150 MW, Noor III will be only the second-ever utility-scale (over 100 MW) CSP tower in the world to store solar energy for night in molten salts, after the 110 MW Crescent Dunes tower project in Nevada.  (The 377 MW Ivanpah solar thermal energy plant, in California, although also at utility-scale, is a kind of tower CSP that can not store energy, as it directly heats water for steam in its receiver.  Unlike molten salts, steam has proven to be poor at storing heat.)

Crescent Dunes followed a much smaller experimental DOE-funded tower pilot, the 10 MW Solar One/Solar Two, which was tested during the 90s and dismantled in 2009.  SENER's Noor III is also much larger than its Gemasolar plant near Seville, the first ever commercial tower CSP with molten salts storage, that has operated successfully round the clock since 2011, but is just 20 MW.

This relative "youth" of tower CSP technology, and especially tower with molten salts energy storage, compared to trough, (How trough CSP differs from tower) gives it great potential for cost reduction, according to SENER.

"Tower has not been deployed as much as parabolic trough," the Performance Guarantee Manager at SENER, Sergio Relloso told SolarPACES in a Skype call.

"We have about 5 GW of CSP technology deployed in the world today, but approximately 4.5 GW of it is parabolic trough, so trough comprises 90% of the CSP that's deployed."

Noor III, at 150 MW, the world's second utility-scale Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) tower with molten salt storage, will deliver power to Morocco's electricity grid by October, if not sooner.

Read more at Noor I, II and III (Image)