Techno-economic assessment of thermal energy storage solutions for a 1 MWe CSP-ORC power plant

摘要

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) have principally been used in the past couple of decades to recover medium grade heat from sources such as geothermal, biomass and the exhaust of a realm of different industrial processes (waste heat recovery). In the past few years, this power generation technology has also been proposed in concentrating solar thermal power applications, aiming to exploit its features in intermediate temperature systems (low water consumption, water-free operation, scalability). These inherent features are best exploited if coupled with thermal energy storage systems to enable good performance in spite of the intermittent energy supply and also to increase the average load factor. To achieve these objectives though, a proper storage system tailored to the heat profile captured by the solar collector and to the characteristics of the power cycle must be identified.