ACCIONA is participating in the European “SOLARX” project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program. The project, which started in 2022 and will run for three years, involves seven other partners from six EU countries.

The project addresses the challenges of today's energy infrastructure by improving its capacity to handle large volumes of intermittent renewable energy. To this end, SOLARX aims to integrate three high-concentration solar technologies and intelligent AI-based resource management into a dispatchable renewable energy system (RES). These three key technological elements of the project are:

• An intelligent solar resource management algorithm designed to instantly meet local energy demands.
• A high efficiency concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) receiver.
• A H2 bi-energy receiver with negative carbon emissions.

In this way, ACCIONA and its partners aim to demonstrate that the combination of a single facility capable of producing process heat, electricity and hydrogen (H2) from the solar resource, taking into account energy demand and market prices, can drive economies and redefine the rules to create an efficient system that facilitates the creation of a carbon negative energy future.

In addition, this project not only addresses the challenges related to the management of solar resources and technological challenges, but also explores ways to manage the entire innovation process along the entire value chain, integrating knowledge from the social sciences and humanities.

For its part, ACCIONA is contributing its extensive industrial experience in solar thermal technology and its techno-economic know-how as a benchmark EPC company, which helps to give the project a real dimension.

To learn more about the SOLARX project, click here.