Mon, 17 April, 2023
Members of the GeoSmart project consortium organised a mini-conference at the SolarEx Istanbul 2023 industrial fair, where they were able to deliver some information about the project.
Around 100 people showed up to hear about the ‘Hybridization of Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) with Geothermal and Biomass,’ courtesy of Bertuğ Çelebi and Derek Baker of Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and Giulia Cassini and Shahab Rohani from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Germany.
The presentation showed how concentrated solar thermal (CST) power can work in union with geothermal energy and biomass resources. Despite providing flexible energy, CST is an intermittent resource while geothermal offers great baseload energy but can see a decrease in efficiency on days with a high ambient temperature. Meanwhile, Biomass, such as olive residue, is abundant in winter.
Creating hybrid plants can allow each of these resources to be exploited to their greatest efficiency, sharing equipment and reducing operation and maintenance costs between them.
Once these technologies have been hybridised, the daily flexibility from solar and the seasonal flexibility from both solar and biomass can be used together to create more efficient outputs across the seasons, improving he economics of operation and increasing the total power output of these power plants.
The GeoSmart project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 818576.