The Department of Energy recently announced $24 million in investment in Solar-Thermal and Industrial Decarbonization Technologies.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently released a new roadmap and awarded $24 million to ten research teams that will advance next-generation concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) technologies, which utilize the sun to generate heat for electricity production and industrial processing. Five of these ten projects will focus on advancing industrial uses for this technology, specifically in the cement, hydrogen, and chemicals sectors, and help advance the goals laid out in DOE’s Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap and recently launched Industrial Heat Shot. This announcement will further advance the development and deployment of solar energy technologies and help support achieving a net-zero economy by 2050.
CSP technologies, which use mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, can be used to generate electricity using a turbine, but the same technologies can also be applied to deliver heat to a variety of industrial applications, like water desalination, food processing, chemical production, and mineral processing.
The University of Maryland: College Park (UMD) was named as one of the projects receiving funding under the program. UMD will receive an investment of $2 million, and their project will develop a novel chemical reactor to decarbonize the production of propylene, a key precursor to many chemicals.
