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Concentrating Solar Power experts share their outlook on the state of the industry in 2012

Towards the end of last year the CSP sector in the U.S. saw more projects move towards construction. A total of 390MW of new CSP projects is currently under construction, Crescent Dunes developed by Solar Reserve, using tower technology with molten salts and a capacity of 110MW, and Mojave Solar developed by Abengoa using parabolic trough technology with a capacity of 280MW. This is in addition to the 392 megawatt Ivanpah project by BrightSource Energy that broke ground in 2010. The question now is what are the next milestones for the industry in 2012?

“2012 is going to be a turning point for the industry because there will be some very important projects that will start up.” Said Eric Svendsen (Senior Vice President, Foster Wheeler), as part of series of exclusive interviews hosted by CSP Today in conjunction with the Solar Thermal Power Conference & Exhibition taking place on 27-28 June in Las Vegas.

Luis Crespo (Secretary General / President, Protermosolar / ESTELA) stated ‘The solar thermal industry today is close to 2GW installed in the world, and in front of us we have 2 GW to be installed in Europe in the short term a couple more gigawatts in the US in the next 2 years.’ This signifies a positive turn as the industry continues to find momentum with new projects that will quadruple the current amount of MWs in construction. This could be partly due to the evolution of the CSP value proposition ‘We have to tell governments what the real value of CSP in each of the markets, so it is different in the US, it is different in Spain and it is different in Morocco.’ Nikolaus Benz (Managing Director), Schott Solar.

CSP Today have released the insightful 7 minute interview for public access, providing the inside track from across the CSP value chain including policy-makers, developers, EPCs and technology suppliers to map the challenges and opportunities for CSP in 2012. The line up of 7 experts including José Manuel Nieto(Director – Thermoelectrical Business), Acciona, Eduardo Zarza (Head – Solar Concentrating Systems), CIEMAT-PSA, Kari Ven (Director) Huiyin and Ralf Wiesenberg, Director, Sun to Market Solutions have shared their views on the challenges facing the industry in 2012, the impact of current CSP projects in construction and the next steps the industry should take to increase the installed CSP capacity.

To find out their answers you can watch the video interviews here: www.csptoday.com/usa/video