Commercial Readiness of eSolar Next Generation Heliostat

eSolar has been designing small heliostats since the company's founding in 2007. One of the cornerstones of our approach to heliostat design is to deploy many factory-built small heliostats in high density fields. The fields are replicated and thus aggregated into solar plants supporting steam and molten salt electric power, integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC), and process heat applications, such as enhanced oil recovery and desalination. The small heliostat approach has been used in several pilot projects and was previously evolved into a commercially available product presented in 2011 at SolarPACES. In this paper we discuss the ground up redesign of our small heliostat hardware, with a focus of leveraging the proven approach into a higher reliability, globally applicable, more industrial, simple to source and most importantly total installed cost reduced solar collector product. During the redesign we discovered methods to simplify the design and confirmed that small, factory-built, affordable heliostats provide a compelling concentrated solar thermal technology. We discuss details on system optimization, concept selection and prototype development, including some results from design validation testing. Finally, we discuss how this new solar collector system (SCS5) performs and meets economic requirements. eSolar's SCS5 product will be commercially released early in 2014, and is currently available to quote for CSP projects.