Techno-economic investigation of parabolic trough solar power plant with indirect molten salt storage

In this paper, we established the mathematical model of a solar parabolic trough plant with a molten salt indirect storage, and then we simulated the model using Matlab software. The reference plant ‘‘Andasol-1" with 50MWe were used to validate the simulated results. After that, we studied the storage size impact on the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) by developing optimization methods based on hours of storage (TES) and solar multiple (SM). A comparison is achieved for different sites due to the developed option in our code, which gives for any known DNI location the LCOE. We found that the lowest LCOE belongs to Ouarzazate in comparison to Andasol-1 (Spain), Bechar (Algeria), Titaouine (Tunisia) and Oujda (our study case). For Oujda, the different simulated results are approximately the same as the case of Andasol-1 (LCOE is about 0.25 €/KWh with a solar multiple equals to 2).