Effect of heliostats reflectivity on the cost of solar thermal tower power plant

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation based approach to analyze the effect of solar concentrator's reflectivity on initial cost of the solar thermal tower power plant (STTPP). It discusses the reflectivity of different materials used as solar concentrators in STTPP. TRNSYS software is used to simulate the power plant and effect of using different reflective material is observed. It is found that with 0.9 reflectivity of solar mirror, 10300 heliostats are required to produce 40 MW of electricity which cost 13000 Million PKR while a small increase in the reflectance from 0.9 to 0.94 has decrease the cost to 11292 Million PKR. RETScreen software is used for cost analysis of this system. It is observed that 5.4 percent of the initial cost is reduced and payback period is decreased from 13 to 9 years.