Category Archives: News

Free Online CSP Courses Coming This Fall

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Northeastern University is developing free online CSP courses that will be offered to the public this fall. Please complete this short questionnaire if you are interested in the courses.

The courses are meant to support prospective, new, or existing workers in the CSP industry. The planned topics include:

1) What is CSP: An overview of the discipline and its advantages
2) Incident solar radiation prediction, ray tracing basics, losses, software available and control needs
3) Receiver design: basic design and numerical approaches
4) Energy storage, need and cost factors
5) Potential for production processes at high temperature high heat fluxes in CSP systems

2023 overview

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Here is our 2023 overview. At a glance. With numbers.

New website
Visitors
Pages visited
Followers
Followers
Followers
Experts
in our database
Mentor-mentee connections
Webinar
Online
networking events
In-person
networking event
Representations
at conferences

Want to learn more?

Underrepresented genders @ SolarPACES 2023

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This year at the SolarPACES 2023 conference in Sydney, the voice and talent of underrepresented genders were heard!

For the first time, a gender identity question was added to the registration form, in order to establish gender statistics (left pie chart below). Around 14% of attendees declared themselves as women and non binary, 73% as men. 14% did not provide this information. Considering only declared gender identities (right pie chart below), 16% were of underrepresented genders and 84% were men.

Last year, the participation of women was estimated around 16% from the attendees list. The participation of underrepresented genders thus seems to remain stable, although this year the gender identity of a non-negligible part of the attendees is unknown. We hope that next year, more people will answer the gender question to have more reliable data.

It is worth noticing that with 25% of women speakers, the “Advanced Materials, Manufacturing and Components” topic far exceeded the global participation of women to the conference.

Also this year, half of the topic track chairs were women, who in turn suggested more female session chairs.

Kudos ladies, we hope to see even more of you next year at SolarPACES 2024 in Italy!

Margarita M. Rodriguez-Garcia (CIEMAT), Audrey Soum-Glaude (PROMES-CNRS), Maitane Ferreres Eceiza (Fraunhofer ISE), Silvia Trevisan (KTH), Ana Drinčić (NIC Slovenia), Zahra Mahdi (Jülich), Ayesha Jacobs (Zutari), Kaoru Tsuda (Nano Frontier Tech), Marina Sevilla (Zepren)

Aránzazu Fernández García is the new Spanish representative at SolarPACES ExCo

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Following the retirement of Dr. Eduardo Zarza, who received the SolarPACES Lifetime Achievement award 2023 with Pr. Robert Pitz-Paal, Dr. Aránzazu Fernández García (CIEMAT) will be the new Spanish representative at SolarPACES Executive Committee.

She is head of the Materials for concentrating solar thermal technologies (UMAT) research unit, and responsible of the Solar reflector durability analysis and optical characterization laboratory (OPAC), at Plataforma Solar de Almería, Spain.

She has a long experience in the optical characterization and durability analysis of solar reflectors and the optimization of cleaning techniques for concentrating solar thermal plants.