NETL gathers partners for concentrated solar, converting municipal waste into fuel

Published on July 06, 2023 by Chris Galford

Ahead of the July 4th holiday, the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) announced it and its partners planned to explore concentrated solar applications and conversion of waste products into fuel in West Virginia.

“CCRIC will demonstrate that concentrated solar power has many potential applications beyond just power production,” Matthew Adams, NETL engineer, said. “Not only does CCRIC present exciting new opportunities for West Virginia but the work will also demonstrate that communities across the country can be more efficient by using renewable resources and by transforming waste, that would otherwise be costly to manage and dispose of, into a valuable commodity.”

Based in West Virginia’s Logan County, the Coal Communities Regional Innovation Cluster (CCRIC) project will push commercialization of concentrated solar technologies and build out a waste-to-energy process. As such, it will have two prongs to its process: converting municipal solid waste into valuable fuels and converting solar energy into thermal energy and/or electrical power.

The prime recipient of the project will be the Region 2 Planning & Development Council located in Huntington, West Virginia. Under it will be four subrecipients: the Logan County Commission, Solis Power, Trilogy Financial and M2M Ventures. Each has their own role to play in the effort. For example, the Logan County Commission is helping transition coal communities to better potential energy technologies. On the other hand, Solis is the developer of the concentrated solar technology the project will utilize and Trilogy holds the patents for the waste to energy process. Rounding things out, M2M will assist with enhanced oil and gas recovery work.

As a whole, the project is supported by $4 million in Congressional funding for the lab. More than $40 million was provided by NETL partners in CCRIC.

Over the course of the project, the solar energy side will showcase three things: a 24-hour concentrated solar electricity generation plant with thermal energy storage and commercially available gas and steam turbines, generation of heat suitable for use in high temperature industrial processes and enhanced oil and gas recovery possibilities.