SCHOTT Solar wins CSP Today Award

SCHOTT Solar’s receiver technology has won an award for “Best Applied R&D” as part of the 4th US Concentrated Solar Power Summit in San Francisco. Apart from winning this particular R&D related award SCHOTT Solar was the only company to have been selected as a finalist for two additional out of a total five awards.

“We are delighted with the award for ‘Best Applied Research and Development,’”said Prof. Udo Ungeheuer, chairman of the Board of Management of SCHOTT AG, “for it once again strongly reinforces SCHOTT Solar’s role and the company’s long-standing perception as the market and technology leader for receivers.”

Solar energy has the greatest technological potential among all renewable sources of energy. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) in particular offers the possibility of generating clean electricity on a large scale. The evacuated receiver tubes, being the key components of CSP plants, play a major role in determining their overall efficiency: the receivers absorb the concentrated sunlight and transform it into heat which is eventually used for electricity generation. Therefore they have to withstand high temperatures and show minimized heat emissions at the same time.

To achieve this, SCHOTT Solar developed a new coating of the receiver’s steel tube that can absorb more than 95% of the sunlight, keeps emissivity to less than 10% and shows temperature stability even far beyond 400°C (approximately 752°F).

“Thanks to our new generation of receivers it will be possible to produce solar electricity even more economically in the future,” said Christoph Fark, managing director of SCHOTT Solar CSP GmbH. “Overall cost reductions are the basis for the technology to be established worldwide on a grand scale. Already today Concentrated Solar Power plants offer a real alternative to conventional fossil fuel electricity generation.”