Analysis of high temperature thermal energy storage for solar power plant

Abstract

Integration of storage system plays an important role for economic success of solar thermal power plant. At present two-tank, thermocline, concrete, castable ceramic and phase change material (PCM) are most common existing storage options, each of these storage system have own unique feature. A comparative analysis is done for the storage system by fixing the size of solar power plant of 50MW and storage duration of 6 hour. A cost and energy analysis is carried out to evaluate economic and energy requirement of storage system. The study evaluates the specific cost of each system. From this analysis thermocline thermal storage is come as preferred option. The performance parameter like efficiency, Levelized electric cost (LEC) are also been evaluated in this study.