Thermo-economic study on the implementation of steam turbine concepts for flexible operation on a direct steam generation solar tower power plant

Among concentrating solar power technologies, direct steam generation solar tower power plants represent a promising option. These systems eliminate the usage of heat transfer fluids allowing for the power block to be run at greater operating temperatures and therefore further increasing the thermal efficiency of the power cycle. On the other hand, the current state of the art of these systems does not comprise thermal energy storage as there are no currently available and techno-economically feasible storage integration options. This situation makes direct steam generation configurations even more susceptible to the already existing variability of operating conditions due to the fluctuation of the solar supply. In the interest of improving the annual performance and competitiveness of direct steam generation solar tower systems, the present study examines the influence of implementing two flexibility enhancing concepts which control the steam flow to the turbine as a function of the incoming solar irradiation. The proposed concepts were implemented in a reference plant model previously developed by the authors. Then, a multi-objective optimization was carried out in order to understand which configurations of the steam turbine concepts yield reductions of the levelized cost of electricity at a lower investment costs when compared to the reference model. Results show that the implementation of the proposed strategies can enhance the thermo-economic performance of direct steam generation systems by yielding a reduction of up to 9.2% on the levelized cost of electricity, mainly due to allowing 20% increase in the capacity factor, while increasing the investment costs by 7.8%.