The white paper. Why no link on reneweconomy?

... with 15 hours of thermal energy storage, down to between 5 and 7 cents (US) per kilowatt-hour.

Tech companies sure say a lot of things in white papers. This statement, if true, would signal the end-game for coal, as well as make any talk of nuclear power in Australia redundant, instantly. It's the sort of wish fulfillment prophesy that many of us have grown very skeptical about.

Here's the executive summary from the white paper:

FRENELL is a German technology company specializing in the manufacture and turnkey delivery of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants with integrated energy storage systems. The firm works with global energy investors and advisors to design and deliver cost-competitive solar solutions enabling power utilities to transition from fossil fuel to solar energy in providing base load and peak power to consumers all day every day.

This White Paper presents FRENELL’s new Direct Molten Salt (DMS®) technology as a key enabler for this transition. It provides a broad overview of DMS®, its range of technical and situational applications, and the related commercial economics. The Paper is written against a background of industry concerns that dismiss CSP as way too costly to supply demand-matching electricity compared with conventional power plants. These concerns have resulted in continuing reliance on cheap but volatile renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic and wind power with conventional fossil-fuel based power plants to cover the remaining supply gaps. Yet fossil fuels are not without their problems. New exploitation technologies in oil and gas have stranded a number of large-scale energy investments. Short-term hydrocarbon supply and price volatilities have likewise raised the investment risk on future multibillion-dollar energy infrastructure projects disrupting national energy plans and budgets alike.

Is there a solution to such problems? Can we ease or end our reliance on volatile fossil fuels as the primary source of base-load and peak-demand electricity? And, if we can, how? What technology must we use? FRENELL’s engineers have been asking themselves these very questions. They developed DMS® in response. It is a new technology using CSP to collect and store the sun’s energy to provide an affordable, stable, ondemand supply of electricity. This White Paper explains this together with the advantages of DMS® such as:

• DMS® plants can deliver demand-driven electricity for as little as 5 - 12 US¢/kWh, already break-even with the price of coal-fired power and economically competitive with gas-fired power
• DMS® CSP plants reach the lowest levelized electricity costs when designed for base-load power delivering their nominal power capacity 24 hours a day from spring to autumn.
• All-up production costs drop by 80% once DMS® power plants are fully depreciated, typically after 20 years with a further 20 years remaining in the plant life cycle
• DMS® offers the potential for governments to end electricity subsidies and remove the associated cost pressures from their budgets
• DMS® plants provide the opportunity for sun-rich countries to transition from fossil fuels to solar energy and thereby, for those countries with gas and oil reserves of their own, to export these or redirect them to export higher-value industrial production
• Built primarily using coil steel and glass, more than 70% of DMS® construction inputs can usually be sourced within each user country thereby building local industry and supporting the country’s balance of payments

This White Paper will explain these and other advantages of the FRENELL DMS® in detail. In doing so, it attempts to take the middle ground by providing sufficient detail to satisfy industry professionals while limiting that detail to make it as easy as possible for those with a more general interest to appreciate the technological advance DMS® represents.