Page - 115 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

CSTP energy have reached impressively low levels in recent auctions: $0.063/kWh in 2016, to less than $0.05/kWh in 2017. Further reductions are anticipated. CSTP’s future possibilities were explored in a joint study by the IEA’s SolarPACES Working Party, Greenpeace International, and the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association (47). It concluded that ‘… concentrated solar thermal power could account for up to 25% of the world’s energyneeds by2050.’ 8.2.2.8 Concentratingphotovoltaics (CPV) In CPV power plants curved reflectors or lenses are used to focus sunlight onto small, highly efficient multi-junction solar PV cells. They have the potential to drive down electricity generation costs at large power stations in very sunny locations. They often use solar trackers and cooling systems to increase their conversion efficiencies, are modular so that individual arrays can easily be combined into much larger power generating facilities and can be used in smaller spaces; higher-power, smaller PV arrays also reduce balance-of-system costs. Systems using high-concentration photovoltaics (HCPV) possess the highest individual cell efficiency of all existing PV technologies, more than 40%, and the potential exists to increase the efficiency of this technology to 50% by the mid-2020s. In 2016 cumulative installed CPV totalled 350 MW, with installations in the US, Spain, China, South Africa, and Italy. Renewableenergy 115