Archived News Stories
News
HelioCon announces publication of 2024 Annual Report
The Heliostat Consortium’s 2024 annual report details new advances in an array of technologies to improve the cost and performance of heliostats. "HelioCon has made tremendous progress on developing, maturing, and validating third-party evaluation and testing capabilities to make them ready for industry," said Guangdong Zhu, HelioCon executive director. "This is exactly what the industry needs right now."
The report also highlights the growth of the HelioCon community over the past year and the consortium’s plans for 2025. Read the 2024 HelioCon annual report and learn more about how HelioCon is driving solar innovation and building the CSP community.
Read the news release.
News
OpenCSP is now live
OpenCSP is a new collaborative environment supporting software, computer-aided design (CAD), data, education, and other applications for concentrating solar power (CSP). “The goal of OpenCSP is to reduce barriers to access high quality metrology and analysis tools, to increase performance of concentrating solar power systems,” says HelioCon member Randy Brost of Sandia National Laboratories. To learn more about this open-source platform, go to the OpenCSP website. Find an overview of the platform’s current offerings at the Portfolio tab.
News
HelioCon partner welcomes visiting NREL researcher in Spain
International collaboration is at the center of the HelioCon community. When NREL researcher Rebecca Mitchell visited Plataforma Solar de Almería in southern Spain at the beginning of October, CIEMAT senior researcher and HelioCon board member Antonio Avila-Marin and a team of CSP researchers showed up to support her work. “Collaborative work makes us stronger in the objective of making CSP succeed,” Avila-Marin shared on LinkedIn. Learn more about Mitchell’s research on heliostat optical measurement and other topics from our HelioCon Seminar Series library.
News
HelioCon went to the 2024 SolarPACES Annual Conference!
Many of our researchers presented at the premiere global CSP conference this year, and they covered a broad range of topics, including wind loading on heliostats, the commercial readiness of several new metrology and testing tools, and how HelioCon’s work is advancing the next generation of CSP technologies on many fronts. In case you could not join us in Rome—learn more about our researchers’ latest work here.
SolarPACES presentations coming soon!
News
DOE’s Heliostat Consortium Awards $3 Million for Six Projects To Advance Heliostat Technology and Workforce for Commercial Readiness
The selected projects will work closely with HelioCon’s research and industry members to help lower the cost of concentrating solar-thermal power and support the next generation of highly trained CSP workers.
News
Reflecting hope: Concentrating solar power can feed the grid and perhaps even remove carbon from Earth's atmosphere
Read about HelioCon’s outlook in the interview with Dr. Guangdong Zhu, Executive Director of the Heliostat Consortium for Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (HelioCon)..Read the full story.
News
SOLAR ENERGY ANNOUNCES A SPECIAL ISSUE - Advances in Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (CSP): Special Issue on Heliostat Technologies
Call for papers is now live: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/solar-energy/about/call-for-papers
News
Senior Capstone Projects Showcase Innovative Solar Thermal Technologies at Northeastern University
Northeastern University showcased innovative senior Mechanical Engineering capstone projects on solar thermal technologies, including a deformable heliostat mirror, a closed-loop control system for heliostat solar tracking, and a solar pyrolysis reactor for producing biochar fertilizer. These projects demonstrate the university's commitment to sustainability and the collaborative efforts of its students to advance concentrating solar technology.
Read the full story.
News
Heliostat Consortium Publishes Annual Report Highlighting Impactful Technical Projects, Opens Second RFP
The Heliostat Consortium (HelioCon) announced publication of the HelioCon Annual Report: 2023, which provides detailed information on progress the HelioCon team has made since its founding, including developing impactful technical projects; expanding the number of partnerships with industry, research, education, and other institutions; increasing staff size; providing information to a growing audience through its web presence; and participating in national and international conferences with industry leaders. HelioCon also announced the opening of a new request for proposals (RFP) focused on lowering the costs of heliostat technologies, improving performance, and creating new heliostat industry opportunities.
Read the full news release.
News
Round 2 HelioCon RFP Now Open!
The Heliostat Consortium’s Round 2 request for proposals (RFP), which will provide $3 million in funding for awarded projects that support six topical areas of research focused on lowering costs and improving performance of heliostat technologies, is now open. Detailed information about the RFP and applying is available online. The RFP is open through Feb. 16, 2024.
Click here to view the RFP webinar recording.
Passcode: @@I24Esp
See RFP Round 2 Questions and Answers (PDF download 139kb)
News
Call for Submissions
The call for papers for the 2024 SPIE Optics + Photonics meeting is now online. The meeting is titled, “Advances in Solar Energy: Heliostat Systems Design, Implementation, and Operation II.” Abstracts are due February 7, 2024, with author notification April 29, 2024. Poster PDFs are due July 24 and manuscripts are due July 31, with the meeting taking place August 18-22, 2024, in San Diego, Ca.
Read the submission guidelines online.
News
Heliosat Prize Semifinalists Announced
The U.S. Department of Energy announced nine semifinalists who will move on to the design phase of the American-Made Heliostat Prize in November. The nine selectees are: Heliogen; Idealab-SwRI CSP Innovators; KVA Technologies; Low-Profile Disc Tracker Genesis; Mark Ayres Engineering; Multiscale Systems; Quantum Optics Applied Research; Solar Dynamics; and Stellenergy. Each semifinalist receives $100,000 to develop concepts that will accelerate technology innovation of selected heliostat components. The nine semifinalists were selected from the concept phase of the challenge, in which competitors identified and developed promising technologies for one of the following components: heliostat structures, mirror facets, and wireless control systems. Read more.
News
HelioCon Annual Report 2023 Now Available
The Heliostat Consortium (HelioCon) 2023 Annual Report is now available online. The report provides detailed information on progress the HelioCon team has made since its founding, including expanding the number of partnerships with industry, research, education, and other institutions; increasing staff size; providing information to a growing audience through its web presence; and participating in national and international conferences with industry leaders.
Read the full report online.
News
HelioCon’s Presence at 2023 SolarPACES Conference
The Heliostat Consortium provided an informational booth at the 2023 SolarPACES Conference in Sydney, Australia, October 10-13. During the conference, eight National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers provided 18 presentations and two plenaries while participating in international task meetings and staffing the HelioCon booth. A photo gallery from the conference is available on the
SolarPACES Conference website.
News
New Publication From HelioCon Researchers
A new publication by authors Tucker Farrell, Yue Cao, Frank Burkholder, Daniel Celvi, Christa Schreiber, and Guangdong Zhu has been published in the Journal of Solar Energy Engineering. The results in the article are intended to analyze environmental stressors and degradation trends among various historical and state-of-the-art solar reflectors.
Read the full article.