The flurry of activity seen in the last 6 months demonstrates that CSP is a young but rapidly-evolving industry

In the second half of 2011 several plants were connected to the grid, new projects were announced and substantial projects were cancelled. So, what's in store for the CSP industry in 2012?

This is a critical question that the CSP Markets Report – New Edition can answer. With top-level analysis and data, this report includes all business critical information that your business requires with updates on the last 6 months plus a new version of the tables with all the CSP plants in operation, under construction and planned.

Signs of weakness in the U.S. market

Examining the critical market shifts in the last few months, one fundamental change occurred when the Loan Guarantee programme finished, since the sector was not able to reduce cost quite as rapidly as PV. The programme had a significant upside impact on the US CSP market with a total of 5 projects, accounting for 1312MW, benefiting from this initiative.

The first victim was Solar Millennium. Solar Millennium was granted with a conditional commitment of a US$ 2.1 billion loan guarantee from the U.S, Department of Energy (DOE) to develop 500 MW CSP at the Blythe location in California. However, the loan guarantees were offered under the proviso that Solar Millennium managed to provide the required commercial financing within a few months. Solar Millennium claimed that the due date given to them by the DOE, being up to the month of August, was too short to realize the financial closure for the project. As a consequence of the shift to PV, Solar Millennium have lost the right to the US$ 2.1 billion loan guarantee.

Spain: still in the lead

Meanwhile, Spain has seen four new CSP plants come online during the last semester, adding 170MW of solar energy to the Spanish grid and keeping the country as the CSP leader by installed capacity with almost 1GW of CSP plants in operation: Palma del Río I, Gemasolar, Helioenergy I y Andasol 3. Gemasolar stands out with its 15 hours of storage, allowing the plant to operate continuously for 24 hours and highlighting the potential of CSP as a base load technology in the near future.

The CSP Markets Report also tackles the developments in the emerging markets such as Morocco, India and South Africa. To find out more about this report and its content, download the Selected Findings with more data that has been extracted from the report itself here: http://www.csptoday.com/csp-markets-report/preview.shtml

For more information, please contact:

Bea González
CSP Today
bea@csptoday.com