DYNAMICS OF OIL-BASED PARABOLIC TROUGH PLANTS - IMPACT OF TRANSIENT BEHAVIOUR ON ENERGY YIELDS

Abstract

Most analyses of electricity yield for solar thermal power plants today are based on calculations of steady-state energy balances in hourly time-resolution. Start-up effects of plants can be considered based on simple energy balance approaches. But transient behaviour during cloudy situations is not well represented by today’s performance models. Currently, Spain is the country, where most new solar thermal power plants are erected. The majority of the plants still follow the technology and experiences of the parabolic trough plants erected in California. But scattered clouds are much more frequent at the Spanish sites leading to high short-term variability of the thermal yield. Such interruptions due to broken clouds may cause significant losses compared to steady-state calculations. This paper describes a systematic correction method to consider dynamic effects in a quasi-static model. This model focuses on start-up procedure and periods of high solar volatility for oil-based parabolic trough plants. Since operation data have not been available for this project, a dynamic simulation model is used as the benchmark.