3:00pm - 4:30 pm
September 26, 2007
Room 106 Engineering Research Builing
1500 Engineering Drive (map)
Madison, Wisconsin
Speaker Background
Andrew McMahan is the Vice President of Technology for SkyFuel, Inc.
SkyFuel (www.skyfuel.com) is a US-based developer of large-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) technology and projects with offices in Albuquerque , Denver and New York City . SkyFuel's technology portfolio focuses on the parabolic trough and linear Fresnel line-focus geometries as well as thermal energy storage.
Andrew McMahan is an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin Solar Energy Laboratory and a veteran of both the conventional and renewable energy sectors.
Summary of Lecture
First there was bankruptcy…
Concentrating solar power (CSP) was researched extensively in the 1970's and 80's, and saw successful commercial deployment by the Luz Company with 354 MW of parabolic trough plants in the Mojave Desert. After Luz went bankrupt in the early 1990's there was very little CSP development in the United States , with the majority of activity in recent years taking place in Spain .
Now there is a renaissance…
However, very recently the outlook for CSP in the United States has changed dramatically: Natural gas and other fossil fuel prices are trading at record highs, investors and utilities are recognizing that the carbon-risk associated with their power generating assets could be offset by the potential of CSP to mitigate that risk and even displace fossil generation. These factors are converging to create a strong drive for innovation and large-scale deployment in CSP leading to unprecedented private-sector activity.
Get the facts…
The fundamentals and advantages of CSP as well as why the interest in CSP is growing so rapidly will be discussed in detail. An overview of the major technological achievements in CSP to date will be given, leading to a discussion of the opportunity for new and innovative solutions to the technical and financial problems related to CSP to rapidly accelerate its competitiveness in the market and large-scale deployment. In the coming decade CSP has the potential to move from being a secondary player in the renewable energy market to the technology that displaces Combined-Cycle Natural Gas power plants as the market reference standard for new electricity generating capacity in the southwest United States .
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