(Justmeans.com / CSR News) - March 19, 2010 – The aluminum giant Alcoa has developed a new type of solar reflector technology which could dramatically lower the cost of building solar thermal plants. The company is trying to replace the traditional glass reflective surface on the solar reflectors with a more familiar material – aluminum.

Solar thermal plants utilize parabolic troughs to focus sunlight onto liquid-filled towers to create steam, which in turn powers a turbine. Alcoa has replaced the glass on these troughs with aluminum and redesigned the truss structure holding it together, creating a lighter, stronger product that they believe could cost up to 20% less than the products currently in use.

While this new design is built to save resources, aluminum manufacturing is the nation’s most intensive industry, according to Green, Inc. While Alcoa has not performed a full Life Cycle Analysis of using the new trough over the traditional, the company will be using recycled materials for as much of the structure as possible.

“We can take the energy intensity out, as much of the structural elements have the potential to use recycled aluminum,” said Scott Kerns, a vice president and general manager at Alcoa. It is expected that the company will have their product in commercial production within 3 years.