Concentrating Solar Power in Colorado

							Concentrating Solar Power in Colorado
J. Thomas McKinnon Colorado School of Mines Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a technology for producing electricity from sunlight via a thermal intermediate. It can be considered the “poor stepsister” to the other method of making electrons from photons – photovoltaics. CSP may not be as glamorous as PV, but it is the technology that gets the job done on a big scale. In this presentation I fill focus on three aspects of CSP. First, I will cover the state of maturity of various CSP technologies – essentially all are variants on mirrors and steam boilers but with some important differences. Next, I will assess the CSP resource in the Southwest (hint – it is huge!). And finally I will address the costs of CSP relative to other electricity technologies. Along the way I will discuss barriers to implementation of CSP and discuss how to overcome the barriers (and why we should).