CSIRO energy engineers have broken the record for the highest temperature and pressure generated by solar power.

A run of sunny weather allowed the team at CSIRO’s Energy Centre in Newcastle to create ‘supercritical’ steam – an ultra-hot, ultra-pressurised form of steam used to drive the world’s most advanced power plant turbines.

CSIRO’s plan to prove that solar thermal technology can match it with the best fossil fuel systems has taken a big step forward.

The breakthrough has implications for the future application and effectiveness of solar power stations.

The supercritical setup uses heat from the sun reflected off a field of angled mirrors and concentrated onto a central receiver point.

At that point, huge amounts of heat generate supercritical levels of steam.

The steam (created at 570°C) is close to the point where aluminium alloy melts. The accompanying pressure of 23.5 megapascals is roughly equivalent to conditions 2 kilometres below the surface of the ocean.

These impressive levels have only ever been produced by the burning of fossil fuels in the past, and they also show for the first time that concentrating solar power (CSP) power plants can match the efficiency and output of the world’s state of the art fossil fuel power plants.

Previously CSP sites had only run at ‘subcritical’ levels.

Among the achievements made just to set up the Advanced Solar Steam Receiver Project was the creation of a fully automated control system which can predicts the heat delivered from every mirror and move them to achieve maximum heat transfer, without overheating and fatiguing the receiver.

It was this level of control and computerisation that push the system to the supercritical level.

The technology is a littler way off full commercial development, but the latest achievement marks an exciting milestone on the way to a minimal cost, low emission energy future.

The array can be seen in the following video.