Cost and production of solar thermal and solar photovoltaics power plants in the United States

Abstract

The costs and electricity production of concentrating solar power (CSP) parabolic trough (PT) and solar tower (ST) plants are presented and compared with photovoltaics (PV) plants in the United States. Production and costs of alternative CSP technologies are strongly non-uniform. Without thermal energy storage (TES), actualized construction costs are 5213–6672 $/kW for CSP PT and 6084 $/kW for CSP ST. With TES, the actualized costs of PT and ST increase to 8258 $/kW and 9227 $/kW respectively. The annual capacity factors of the more reliable PT plants are 28–29% without TES, and 29–33% with TES. ST plants presently deliver much smaller annual capacity factors even when boosted by natural gas (NG) combustion, or fitted with TES. ST appears to be less mature and more troublesome technology than PT. TES is still not delivering the expected improvements suffering efficiency and reliability issues. PV are less expensive than CSP, with actualized construction costs 4739 $/kW. However, as the capacity factors of PV plants are only 26.3–28.5%, CSP already deliver a 1–2% better capacity factors even without TES. In a decadal perspective, PV may certainly suffer soon of the competition by CSP, more likely PT, with the addition of TES, once this energy storage technology will mature, if a simple but reliable mass production product could be defined.