G3P3 Techno-Economic Analysis of UpScaled CentRec® Receiver

Abstract

The objective of this report is to evaluate the cost potential of the up-scaled CentRec® particle receiver as part of a complete CSP plant of representative size. The plant configuration was defined by the boundary conditions specified within the US-DoE Gen3 project “G3P3” for a 100 MWe solar power plant using a high-efficiency supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power block. The study presents the assumptions and the results of the evaluation of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for a particle-based multi-tower CSP plant of 100 MWe, consisting of 12 identical solar tower modules with about 41 MWth each. The centrifugal particle receiver technology developed by DLR is considered. As there is still uncertainty in the cost assumptions for some components, lower and upper bounds were used for the tower cost and the primary heat exchanger cost. The nominal upper particle temperature was given as 800°C. In addition, two cases with an increased upper particle temperature of 1000°C were evaluated. The results show a strong dependency on the cost assumptions both for the tower construction as well as for the primary heat exchanger. For the cases with 800°C upper particle temperature, the estimated LCOE range from 0.05544 $/kWh (lower bound for tower and HX cost) to 0.06435 $/kWh (upper bound for tower and HX cost). When the upper particle temperature is increased to 1000°C, a significant reduction in LCOE is observed (nearly 9% for the lower bound cases, down to 0.05065 $/kWh). Several components show a significant cost reduction due to the reduced particle mass flow and inventory, as a consequence of the higher temperature spread in the particle subsystem. However, the operation of the heat exchanger at such elevated particle inlet temperatures will require some modifications to the G3P3 baseline design that will introduce additional cost. Nevertheless, the results give strong arguments to investigate this option further. All in all, the results show a clear potential to achieve the SunShot goal of less than 0.06 $/kWh.