the present paper is aimed at describing a “closed cycle” power plant schematic (soft, solar oxygen fuel turbine) with macroalgae (seaweed) cultivation in a pond, combustion of its organic matter in a fluidized bed boiler of rankine cycle and return of the combustion products to the pond to feed algae. the oxygen used for combustion is released to atmosphere in photosynthesis. as a renewable fu...

All renewable energy systems make some contribution to climate change. This is due to the emission of greenhouse gases from the fossil fuels combusted for their construction, and as back-up energy during their operation. Accurate calculation of greenhouse gas emissions per kilowatt hour of electricity is difficult, but is an important part of policy making and planning. Calculation methodologie...

Variability of solar power is a key driver in increasing the cost of integrating solar power into the electric grid because additional system resources are required to maintain the grid’s reliability. In this study, we characterize the variability in power output of six photovoltaic plants in the USA and Canada with a total installed capacity of 195MW (AC); it is based on minute-averaged data f...

This paper presents a robust control scheme for a distributed solar collector (DSC) field. As DSC are systems subjected to strong disturbances (mainly in solar radiation and inlet oil temperature), a series feedforward is used as a part of the plant, so that the system to be controlled has one input (fluid flow) and one output (outlet temperature) as the disturbances are partially compensated b...

This paper presents a hybrid controller for a solar air conditioning plant, located at the University of Seville, Spain, and used as a benchmark for the HYCON NoE of the EU. The plant uses two sources of energy: solar and gas, plus a set of accumulation tanks and an absorption tower to provide conditioned air to an university building. The hybrid control is based on a model predictive control s...

In a molten-salt solar power tower, liquid salt at 290oC (554oF) is pumped from a ‘cold’ storage tank through the receiver where it is heated to 565oC (1,049oF) and then on to a ‘hot’ tank for storage. When power is needed from the plant, hot salt is pumped to a steam generating system that produces superheated steam for a conventional Rankinecycle turbine/generator system. From the steam gener...

In this work, we simulate the efficiency of different Heat Transfer Fluids (HTF) and molten salts when circulating through a section of Heat Collecting Elements (HCE) in a parabolic trough system for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP). The simulation shows that the Therminol VP-1 and Dowtherm A synthetic oils are the most efficient in the solar field due to their broad range of working temperature...

banded ultra-violet solar radiation, the high-rise solar tower to updraft the heated air to the atmosphere, and in between the power conversion unit, where a system of coupled turbines and generators transforms the stream of heated air into electric power. A good efficiency of the power plant can only be reached with extra-large dimensions of the tower and/or the collector area. The paper prese...

In recent years, energy production by renewable sources is becoming very important, and photovoltaic (PV) energy has became one of the main renewable sources that is widely available and easily exploitable. In this context, it is necessary to find correct tools to optimize the energy production by PV plants. In this paper, by analyzing available solar irradiance data, an analytical expression f...