How to help invent the transition to a decarbonized world

July 29, 2024 |

by Susan Kraemer

How to help invent the transition to a decarbonized world - research work in solar

How to help invent the transition to a decarbonized world – research work in concentrated solar. Lina Hockaday and colleagues at Stellenbosch University attending the 2017 SolarPACES Conference

Work in concentrated solar research is one rewarding way to help invent the transition to a decarbonized world

SolarPACES talks to concentrated solar energy researchers at various stages in their careers

In recent conversations with local climate protesters, I was surprised by how little these high school and university students knew about the kind of solar needed to decarbonize industrial processes with solar heat, even among students committed to creating a better world. Surveys of high school students have found similar results.

The students I spoke with knew about PV, but some had learned that today’s main career options are uninspiring door-to-door sales or rooftop installations. However, that’s just PV, which is already conquering the world for grid-scale electricity.

But concentrated solar is another story; there’s a lot of innovation in this field. This form of solar energy that directly utilizes the sun’s heat is just starting to make a difference in how we can replace coal or gas in the many ways we heat with fossil fuels, from food and mineral processing to district heating and even manufacturing entirely new solar fuels to replace diesel, gas-based hydrogen, and aircraft fuel.

Replacing such a wide range of fossil energy uses will change how everything is made in the future. And how that will work is still being invented.

So what are some ways to work in concentrated solar thermal?

A career in research – solar heat for industrial decarbonization

When I interviewed solar researcher Lina Hockaday in 2017, she told me she would love to devote the next 40 years to her research focus—applying concentrated solar energy to heat the manganese ores used to make steel.

At that time, she had been the Senior Engineer in Pyrometallurgy at South Africa’s Mintek and was doing her PhD on solar sintering of manganese ores at Stellenbosh University.

Hockaday is now in Western Australia, another mining and solar-rich region, where as Senior Engineer in Solar Pyrometallurgy she is creating Curtin University’s first research program advancing concentrated solar applications to decarbonize industrial heat as one of several Australian universities partnering with HILT CRC.

A career in concentrated solar research can either be through teaching or, as in Hockaday’s case, hands-on supervision at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the execution of research and project management of research projects. She collaborates with other universities, research institutes, and industries trying to decarbonize as she continues investigating ways to incorporate renewable energy and concentrating solar energy into minerals processing.

“I enjoy the teamwork with industry partners that keeps us grounded,” she said.

“As a researcher, it is very satisfying to see how ideas that we propose in research can become real when we develop and demonstrate the technologies and processes. There’s great satisfaction in working with fellow researchers to evaluate how we can produce the minerals and metals that our society requires in less harmful ways than in the past.”

Typically, advanced concentrated solar research is handled in universities’ mechanical engineering faculties. Initially, she had been hesitant to start a doctorate in mechanical engineering, as her experience had been in chemical engineering and minerals processing. However, her experience with process modeling and thermodynamics proved applicable.

“I would encourage young students with an ambition to make a change in the world to consider a career in concentrating solar research,” she said.   “It is a career path where you can set your own direction, results are based on your own application, and the skills that you learn are adaptable for growth in many ways. I continue to learn new skills, and the work is never boring.”

Founding a start-up – concentrating solar heat for manufacturing jet fuel

Philipp Furler is now the CEO of Synhelion, the company that just built the world’s first industrial solar fuel plant, DAWN. I had first interviewed him when he was the Task Leader in solar thermochemistry for SolarPACES about the solar thermochemistry research that led to this invention. Furler’s “aha” moment had come at university.

“During my Bachelor’s degree at ETH Zurich, we visited a lab where I saw how concentrated sunlight melted a ceramic block in a matter of seconds,” said Furler.

“This was a key moment for me as I witnessed how powerful concentrated sunlight can be. Then I did my Master’s degree and later my PhD at the Renewable Energy Carriers Professorship at ETH Zurich, researching solar fuel production.”

Furler had expected that he would work in the energy industry. He hadn’t started out planning a spin-off, but once he saw the potential of solar fuels, he was driven to create impact with his work and founded Sunredox in 2018 to try to commercialize his findings:

“Then I met Gianluca, who had the drive to commercialize this research, and so we merged Sunredox with Synhelion. We joined forces to ensure the technology wouldn’t stay in the research lab, but get industrialized,” he said.

Synhelion has just commissioned DAWN, the world’s first solar fuel plant, as an industrial demonstration plant to prove the technology is ready to scale.
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In this project, all of Synhelion’s innovations are integrated for the first time at an industrial scale, demonstrating the whole process chain from sunlight to liquid fuel. This solar fuel will be available to air, land, and sea transportation partners such as Swiss International Air Lines, who will test and demonstrate how it can decarbonize liquid fuels.

Two early stage researchers

Maria Asunción Palmero, now at Carlos III University of Madrid, and Eylül Gedik, now at RWTH-Aachen in Germany, are two PhD recipients of TOPCSP funding to do a three to four-year research project in concentrated solar.

Palmero is conducting a lifecycle analysis of the Redstone CSP project under construction in South Africa to study its environmental profile. She hopes to present her first findings at the SolarPACES Conference in Rome. She has always loved teaching, and her goal is to teach in a postdoc position at an institution or university with a good CSP investigation program.

Both recipients had been unaware of this thermal form of solar energy until well into their university studies.

“I hadn’t known about CSP in high school,” Palmero confirmed.

“I’d heard a lot about PV. But what kept me going, and why I chose engineering work, was that I really love physics and maths. It was a joy when you could find a solution to the problem that the teacher gave you.”

Gedik, from Turkey, also enjoyed math and physics in high school and initially planned to study wind turbines.

“I chose mechanical engineering to contribute to practical problems and solutions that improve our lives,” she said.

“I had a wonderful supervisor in my Master of Science who introduced me to CSP. To back the fluctuating renewables; PV, and wind, we need dispatchable flexible generation. CSP is that renewable solution, So I see CSP as a solid candidate to realize this energy transition. It’s not the era of competition. It’s the age of collaboration and cooperation.”

Gedik did her master’s in hybridizing PV and CSP to power a combined system to desalinate seawater and treat wastewater to produce agricultural irrigation water. Now, she is modifying steam cycle layouts of CSP plants to increase their flexibility and reduce installation and operation costs.

Her focus will continue to be on energy conversion.”I don’t have the capabilities to analyze the other aspects of CSP plants, such as the heliostat field optics. That’s definitely out of my expertise.”

Bottom line – start science classes young

A prerequisite for this essential scientific work is to have taken STEM courses in high school (computing, algebra, calculus, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry), as this new form of solar engineering requires scientific expertise.

Professor Celia Sobrino visits a class of children for a Science Week demonstration

According to Professor Celia Sobrino, who teaches Thermal and Fluids Engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, inspiring children even as young as 8 or 9 is essential.

She put this into action when to celebrate Science Week, a teacher friend wanted her primary school students to meet a scientist instead of just watching films and reading texts. Sobrino visited her friend’s class to tell the children about research work in concentrated solar thermal energy.

“I showed them how an infrared camera indicates objects at various temperatures by displaying them in different colors,” she said.  “They participated by asking questions and invited me back to show them more experiments. I described the work we do in the laboratory at the university, where we have a molten salt loop to analyze some of the concentrated solar power plant’s components. I was amazed at how attentive they were.”