SolarPACES 2020: SCARABEUS listed as one of the flagship R&D projects in Europe by Prof. Julián Blanco, Managing Director of the Solar Platform in Almería (PSA-CIEMAT)

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This year, most conferences have made the decision to go virtual in order to circumvent the limitations on mobility brought about by COVID-19. SolarPACES has been no different in this regard but the

 

Wednesday’s plenary session, chaired by Ana María Ruiz Frías (Solar Committee Chile), focused on CSP Technology Innovation. All continents were represented by high-level speakers -Australia, Asia, America and China- who introduced their vision about research priorities in Concentrating Solar Power and the tools and funding schemes to enable their accomplishment.

 

In this session, Europe was represented by Prof. Julián Blanco, Director of Plataforma Solar de Almería (CIEMAT), largest research, development and test centre in Europe for Concentrating Solar technologies. Prof. Blanco’s presentation provided an excellent summary of the current research priorities identified by the European Commission, along with a very informative review of the ongoing research activities and flagship projects in Europe. With the aim to make the presentation comprehensive, the contents were broken down into twelve R&I areas approved by the Steering Group of the Solar Energy Technology (SET) Plan in 2017.

 

The SCARABEUS consortium is grateful to Prof. Julián Blanco for making the presentation available for download (link).

Quantis just completed the first phase of Life Cycle Assessment. Know a little bit about this crucial aspect of power plant assessment

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Quantis is leading the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) assessment to evaluate the innovative SCARABEUS technology for CSP application with the objectives to (i) inform the key environmental performance indicator of the SCARABEUS technology development; (ii) to guide the development of the technology towards a more sustainable solution; (iii) to benchmark the SCARABEUS technology against alternative conventional and state of the art technologies.

 

LCA is a structured, comprehensive, and internationally standardized method. It quantifies all relevant emissions and resources consumed and the related environmental and health impacts and resource depletion issues that are associated with any goods or services (“products”). Life Cycle Assessment takes into account a product’s full life cycle: from the extraction of resources, through production, use, and recycling, up to the disposal of remaining waste.

 

                                                                 Figure 1: Workflow of Life Cycle Assessment.

 

Critically, the LCA approach help to avoid resolving one environmental problem while creating other unwanted “shifting of burdens”. LCA helps to prevent, for example, increasing land use or acid rain while reducing greenhouse gases, or increasing emissions in one country while reducing them in another. Life Cycle Assessment is a vital decision support tool to help effectively and efficiently make consumption and production more sustainable.

 

Find out more on Quantis’ website: https://quantis-intl.com/research/scarabeus/