Micro' Solar Power Plant

Background

The goal is to adapt solar/thermal power technologies to needs of rural areas in developing countries. Current research and industrial implementation of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies (Through systems, Power Towers, Solar Dish-Engine systems; see link to CSP overview) made a significant progress. This industrial effort aimed at competing with traditional electrical power generation methods (coal, natural gas, hydro., etc.). Rural areas have different market needs: they are not connected to the grid and therefore require local power production. Because of this, rural areas are willing to pay more in terms of cost per kilowatt-hour, but their consumption is much less than in the industrialized world.

Our approach is to focus: 1. Size (smaller), 2. Cost (less capital cost, local material, local setup), and 3. Maintenance requirements (performed locally).

Micro-Through CSP Example

Concentrating Solar Power Plants (CSP) currently in operation in the USA are large industrial applications and have a unit capacity of 30MW. Each unit has a collecting field area of 200,000 m2 (500m x 500m) which feeds an evaporator with oil heated at 390oC temperature. The evaporator supply a steam turbine that drives an electrical alternator. Our CSP will much smaller. For a capacity of 0.5MW and assuming an efficiency half the efficient of large industrial CSP units, the collecting field would have an area of 7000 m2 (80m x 80m). This energy could be converted to electrical energy using small steam turbine or the steam could be used directly in other applications such as water desalination. If space for the collecting field is limited, the shaded space under the collecting elements could be used to grow plants which normally can not grow under direct sun exposure (see perma-culture references).

Approach

One of the current design directions is to use collectors which do not require continuous sun tracking (e.g. stationary cylindrical reflectors instead of high performance parabolic reflectors). 

Status

This project is in its infancy stages. Currently, a method based on finite-element analysis, was developed to analyze solar radiation/concentration and heat transfer in the collecting element. This will be useful in optimizing the design and minimizing the need to build prototypes.