Economic Feasibility of Thermal Energy Storage-Integrated Concentrating Solar Power Plants

Thermal energy storage for CSP (Concentrating Solar Power)

— The major advantage of concentrating solar power before photovoltaic is the possibility to store thermal energy at large scale allowing dispatchability. Then, only CSP solar power plants including thermal storage can be operated 24 h/day using exclusively the solar resource. Nevertheless, due to a too low availability in mined nitrate salts, the actual mature technology of the two tanks molte...

Concentrating solar thermal power.

In addition to wind and photovoltaic power, concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) will make a major contribution to electricity provision from renewable energies. Drawing on almost 30 years of operational experience in the multi-megawatt range, CSP is now a proven technology with a reliable cost and performance record. In conjunction with thermal energy storage, electricity can be provided ac...

Optimisation of Concentrating Solar Thermal Power Plants with Neural Networks

The exploitation of solar power for energy supply is of increasing importance. While technical development mainly takes place in the engineering disciplines, computer science offers adequate techniques for simulation, optimisation and controller synthesis. In this paper we describe a work from this interdisciplinary area. We introduce our tool for the optimisation of parameterised solar thermal...

Development of an Integrated Thermal Energy Storage and Free-Piston Stirling Generator for a Concentrating Solar Power System

Incorporating thermal energy storage (TES) into a concentrating solar power (CSP) system extends the power production hours, eliminating intermittency and reducing the Levelized Cost of the Energy (LCOE). The designed TES system was integrated with a 3 kW free-piston Stirling convertor. A NaF–NaCl eutectic salt was chosen as the phase change material (PCM) with a melting temperature of 680 ◦C. ...

Solar thermal power plants