Solar Field 2

The National Solar Energy Centre

The National Solar Energy Centre is a focal point for solar research in Australia, bringing together state-of-the-test facilities for solar thermal, solar photovoltaic and solar cooling research and product development.

• 11 April 2006 | Updated 15 May 2012

Overview

The National Solar Energy Centre (NSEC), located at the CSIRO Energy Centre in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, is Australia’s premier research centre for solar energy innovations.

The NSEC is a multipurpose research and demonstration facility, specialising in advances in new solar technologies in collaboration with other national and international research institutes.

With specialised facilities for testing and developing solar thermal energy, solar photovoltaics and solar cooling systems, the Centre is a research hub designed for collaboration with government, industry and research institutions.

High temperature solar thermal facilities

NSEC contains the only high temperature solar thermal research facility of its type in Australia and is home to the largest high concentration solar array in the Southern Hemisphere.

The site has two high concentration solar thermal tower facilities: Solar Field 1 and Solar Field 2.

Both fields are operated from an elevated control room housing the Centre's communications and control systems.Each field contains a power tower and a heliostat (mirrors) array which tracks the sun throughout the day, concentrating the solar heat to produce temperature in excess of 1000º Celsius (C).

Solar Field 1

Solar Field 1 is currently being used to run CSIRO’s SolarGas reactor. This reactor uses the high temperatures generated by the concentrated sunlight to drive a process that produces SolarGas, a syngas mixture that contains 25 per cent more energy than the natural gas feeding into the process.

Solar Field 2

Solar Field 2, commissioned in 2011, is the Southern hemisphere’s largest solar thermal field and has been engineered to have the most flexible test platform for solar thermal technologies, such as turbines, receivers and thermal storage prototypes.

This field is currently being used to test Solar Brayton technology, a process which uses solar heat to generate electricity.

Both fields have also been used to test solar components, such as new heliostat designs, that have been developed by CSIRO and other institutions around the world.

Table 1: Characteristics of Solar Field 1 and Solar Field 2

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