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
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!
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.
Women+ in Concentrated Solar rejoices that this year the SolarPACES technical innovation award was granted to a gender diverse team including two women and three men, for a record-breaking solar absorber coating.
This team was born of a collaboration between Ms. Kaoru Tsuda, CEO of Nano Frontier Technology Japanese company, and Dr Juan Felipe Torres and Dr Joe Coventry of the Australian National University. Two PhD candidates were also involved in the developments, Ms. Sahar Hosseini and Mr. Yifan Guo. Kudos to the team!
