The Department of Energy (DOE) has broken ground on the Generation 3 Particle Pilot Plant (G3P3), a novel concentrating solar power (CSP) facility at Sandia National Laboratory that will use sand-like ceramic particles instead of molten salt to produce and store high-temperature energy.
When completed in 2024, the “multi-megawatt” solar thermal pilot project will utilize an existing heliostat field at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to concentrate sunlight on a gravity-driven particle-based receiver and heat the receiver’s ceramic-based particles to more than 700C. Along with potentially enabling at least six hours of particle-based energy storage, the system will notably demonstrate heating of a working fluid—supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2)—to 700C or more, using a highly efficient sCO2 Brayton cycle to generate electricity.
