Manuel Blanco

Thirty six years of experience as a solar researcher and engineer, contributing to advancing the state-of-the-art of Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) technologies. Expert on Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Optics, and Modelling of Energy Systems.

European Research Area (ERA) Chair in Solar Thermal Technologies for the Eastern Mediterranean of the Cyprus Institute. Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee of SolarPACES, the Implementing Agreement of the International Energy Agency responsible for promoting the development and deployment of solar thermal power technologies and the solar-assisted manufacture of fuels and chemicals.

Former Director of the Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative (ASTRI), an eight-year eighty-seven million dollars research program to increase the cost competitiveness of concentrating solar thermal (CST) technologies and enhance the international positioning of Australia in these technologies, which in addition to CSIRO involves six Australian universities and the collaboration of several US National Laboratories and universities. Former General Coordinator of EU-SOLARIS, a six million Euros European FP7 project whose goal is to carry out all the preparatory activities needed to create an international organization to manage, as a Distributed Large European Research Infrastructure, the CST research infrastructures of eleven European and Mediterranean research centers.

Former CSIRO’s Solar Energy Systems Research Group Science Leader; Director of the Solar Thermal Energy Department of the National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain (CENER); Chair and Full Professor of the Engineering Department of the University of Texas at Brownsville; Director of the Plataforma Solar de Almería of CIEMAT the largest European solar research infrastructure; Principal Investigator of the SOLGAS and SIREC tower technology R&D projects, which paved the way towards PS10, the first commercial solar tower power plant.

Author of numerous scientific publications, and participation in a senior capacity in a large number of national and international expert groups and committees.