Session: 05-13 Heliostat Consortium 3

Paper Number: 107501

107501 - Status Quo of Heliostat Field Deployment Processes 

The Heliostat Consortium is a five-year program seeking to stimulate a US heliostat economy and provide research and development to reduce the cost of heliostats to a SETO 2030 goal of 50 $/m². The consortium has divided the many aspects of heliostat into several subtopics.  The Field Deployment subtask covers a broad range of focus areas including financing, site selection, solar field layout, supply chain, assembly, site preparation, construction, and installation, calibration, operation and maintenance, and end-of-life disposal.  

This paper comments on current practices and tools used in the major plants internationally.  Details are provided on the financing and permitting phases of projects and the impacts on project viability.  Some developers level fields and remove vegetation while others use field layout techniques the leave the natural contours and vegetation intact.  Vegetation may have the beneficial effect of mitigating dust.  The field layout also impacts the operations of the plant with washing trucks or manual facet cleaning being required.  This work also looks at calibration techniques.  Closed loop control systems have been deployed while others use pre-calibration in the assembly building and perform a final calibration on tower. Novel calibration techniques may utilize a gantry of lasers or unpiloted aerial vehicle.

Presenting Author: Jeremy Sment Sandia National Laboratories

Presenting Author Biography: Jeremy Sment is a mechanical engineer at Sandia National Labs. Jeremy focused on wind loading over heliostat fields and long-range flux mapping and calibration tools at the NSTTF for his graduate work through 2013. He rejoined the NSTTF in 2018 to support the Gen 3 particle pathway where he is focused as project lead, thermal energy storage lead, and the handling of solid particles and commercial scale particle system integration focused on tower design and technoeconomic analysis. Jeremy joined the HelioCon effort in late 2021 and has conducted a series of interviews with industry experts to develop a high-level understanding of solar field deployments in the context of US energy market trends. Jeremy holds a Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering at UNM.