At the 2019 SolarPACES Conference, Vast Solar took the SolarPACES Technical Innovation Award for their use of high temperature sodium-based HTF in tower CSP, presented in their paper: Vast Solar: improving performance and reducing cost and risk using high temperature modular arrays and sodium heat transfer fluid.
Their design appears like a small modular tower system, but it also borrows many attributes of CSP’s earlier technology, the more tried and tested and bankable trough CSP. (How CSP works; trough, tower, etc)
Project director Kurt Drewes has a diverse CSP background; from Fresnel at Spain’s Novatec, to trough at ACWAPower’s Bokpoort, to three tower projects, Abengoa’s Khi Solar One and ACWA Power’s Redstone and Noor III.
This mixed technology background informs an openminded approach that results in an innovative design that marries the best technology attributes of tower with the best of trough CSP.
Source: https://www.solarpaces.org/