By Jason Deign

You cannot blame a light-starved miner from craving a ray of sunshine. But in recent months, the mining industry has begun taking a much more serious interest in all things solar.

As previously reported, currently the mining industry is present in more than 100 countries around the world.

With demand for raw materials continuing unabated, mining companies should have plenty of cash to spend on operational improvements.

And with conventional power representing both an important cost and, frequently, a logistical challenge, renewable energy plants seem an attractive investment.

Mining companies

As previously mentioned in CSP Today, there are good reasons why mining companies might want to consider renewable energy sources such as CSP to help power their operations.

These include, for example, the frequent availability of open land with renewable energy resources, a relative lack of permitting challenges, a good fit in terms of facility life spans and a ready availability of logistical links and building workforces.

Of course, mining operations are not restricted in their choice of renewable energy sources, meaning CSP will likely have to compete in many locations with cheaper and more established technologies such as wind power or PV.

Most recent renewable energy deployments by mining companies have indeed featured wind or solar.

The German power company RWE Innogy, for example, in September installed a 20.5MW wind farm to help power mines in the Rhineland, and is due to commission a further 14MW facility by the end of the year.

The month before, Solea Renewables, part of the German solar contractor Solea, broke ground on a 1MW PV plant designed to reduce daytime diesel dependency at a chrome mine operated by Cronimet Energy in Limpopo province, South Africa.

Back in June, meanwhile, the Australian renewable energy developer Pacific Hydro formed a joint venture with the world’s second-largest mining company, Vale, to build two wind farms to support mineral extraction operations in northeast Brazil.

There is no reason, however, why CSP could not be taking a share of these deals, particularly in high-insolation situations where dispatchability is an asset.

This is in fact already starting to happen in Chile, says Josefin Berg, solar market analyst at IHS Emerging Energy Research. “Mining companies are trying to secure their power supply,” she says.

PV competition

Berg says solar thermal power still faces competition there from PV, which has the advantage of being cheaper, but nevertheless “some of the mining companies are more comfortable with CSP because of dispatchability.”

In addition, the fact that the main contenders for Chilean CSP projects are large Spanish engineering companies that may already have strong credentials in the region could help to remove some of the perceived risk attached to CSP, she says.

Andrew Stiel, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says: “It's actually surprised me that there hasn't been more activity and work in that space.

“You can imagine situations where it is not so easy to get a gas pipeline and they want to look to more natural sources of power.”

He adds: “In a place like Australia you have huge mines in the middle of nowhere, where there is no grid, so if you can begin to develop something which can provide a solution for these locations in a renewable sense then that might be attractive.”

And if the additional cost of solar thermal storage, for instance through molten salt tanks, is off-putting for mining companies then the fact that CSP can be hybridised provides an alternative way of gaining dispatchable energy, Stiel comments.

“With hybrid plants, you can use the solar thermal resource to feed into a steam-cycle or even air combined-cycle gas turbine,” he says.

Mineral resources companies are already starting to see CSP as a valuable provider of process heat for operations such as enhanced oil recovery, with BrightSource and Glasspoint just two solar thermal names currently involved.

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Or contact the editor, Jennifer Muirhead