Published in:
Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power, 136 (2014) 1
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1115/1.4024964
ISSN:
0742-4795;
1528-8919
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
The construction of the first generation of commercial hybrid solar gas-turbine power plants will present the designer with a large number of choices. To assist decision making, a thermoeconomic study has been performed for three different power plant configurations, namely, simple- and combined-cycles along with a simple-cycle with the addition of thermal energy storage. Multi-objective optimization has been used to identify Pareto-optimal designs and highlight the trade-offs between minimizing investment costs and minimizing specific CO2 emissions. The solar hybrid combined-cycle power plant provides a 60% reduction in electricity cost compared to parabolic trough power plants at annual solar shares up to 20%. The storage integrated designs can achieve much higher solar shares and provide a 7–13% reduction in electricity costs at annual solar shares up to 90%. At the same time, the water consumption of the solar gas-turbine systems is significantly lower than conventional steam-cycle based solar power plants.