Low Cost Heliostat Development Phase II Final Report

The heliostat field in a central receiver plant makes up roughly one half of the total plant cost. As such, cost reductions for the installed heliostat price greatly impact the overall plant cost and hence the plant’s Levelized Cost of Energy. The general trend in heliostat size over the past decades has been to make them larger. One part of our thesis has been that larger and larger heliostats may drive the LCOE up instead of down due to the very nature of the precise aiming and wind-load requirements for typical heliostats. In other words, it requires more and more structure to precisely aim the sunlight at the receiver as one increases heliostat mirror area and that it becomes counter-productive, cost-wise, at some point.