A Comparative Thermoeconomic Study of Hybrid Solar Gas Turbine Power Plants

Abstract

The construction of the first generation of commercial hybrid solar gasturbine 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, simpleand combinedcycles along with a simplecycle with the addition of thermal energy storage. Multiobjective optimization has been used to identify Paretooptimal designs and highlight the tradeoffs between minimizing investment costs and minimizing specific CO2 emissions. The solar hybrid combinedcycle 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 gasturbine systems is significantly lower than conventional steamcycle based solar power plants.