Wilson Solarpower System

Wilson is breaking ground on its 100 kilowatt pilot plant early next year using existing technology

Wilson Solarpower is developing a highly-cost-competitive CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) system that offers significant advantages over other clean energy technologies. Its initial system, however, to be piloted immediately, is based on existing technology. The Wilson System uses modular, mass-produced components with minimal on-site deployment costs and few environmental impacts. Unlike most other CSP systems that use steam to drive large turbines, the Wilson System uses hot air to drive microturbines. This eliminates the need to use scarce water for cooling. The turbines use conventional fuels such as natural gas or biofuels to provide fully-dispatchable power 24/7, regardless of weather, which wind and photovoltaic power systems cannot do.

The Wilson CSP system can be sized as small as 100 kWe (kilowatts, for roughly 20-30 US homes) to provide distributed power adjacent to the load while also providing waste heat from the turbines in combined heat and power (CHP) applications. Tens, hundreds or thousands of modules can be combined to provide power at any scale.

Wilson's System will use "best of breed" heliostats, power tower components and commercial microturbines. Over time, Wilson intends to incorporate its own high-temperature ceramic components into next-generation CSP systems capable of competing with even the lowest cost fossil fuel baseload systems. To this end, Wilson Solarpower recently received a United States Department of Energy (DOE) grant of up to $3.7 million to further the development of its Wilson Solar Receiver™ and Wilson Solar Battery™ that will significantly increase modular size and the efficiency of the Wilson CSP System.

Special System Advantages:
•    Simple, low-cost, all-factory produced, minimal on-site labor
•    Uses no water, salts, oils, hydrogen or helium to drive the turbine
•    Has extremely high reliability due to redundancy of numerous modules
•    Plant size is widely variable (100 kilowatts to 1000s megawatts)
•    Is comparatively quickly engineered, permitted, erected, commissioned (standard modules, like wind turbines)

Special Siting Advantages:
•    Utility-need-driven, e.g., can be of any size in close proximity to load
•    Few, if any, environmental concerns
•    Minimal impact on the land - may support second use (e.g., farming, landfill, wind power)
•    Sites can be hilly and need not be perfectly flat
•    Sites can be irregularly shaped and need not be round or rectangular
•    Sites can be square miles or as small as half a football field

The modular system is based on two MIT energy-efficiency technologies:

• Wilson Heat Exchanger™
• Wilson Microturbine™

and on two Wilson solar technologies:

• Wilson Solar Receiver™
• Wilson Solar Battery™