Development of a clean power plant integrated with a solar farm for a sustainable community

Abstract

Renewable energy sources are attracting attention as a replacement of fossil fuel-based sources. This paper presents a new renewable combined cycle power plant to deliver smart services for a sustainable community. A case study is undertaken for the Kedron Community in the city of Oshawa in Canada. The integrated power plant depends on solar radiation and seawater. The services produced are electric power, heating load, fresh water, and liquified hydrogen as a clean fuel. The combined plant consists of six subsystems: solar farm, Gas turbine cycle, Rankine cycle, multi-effect desalination, electrolyzer, and hydrogen liquefaction subsystem. The integrated system has been studied thermodynamically to investigate the thermal and exergy performance. The solar farm uses HITEC with a mass flow rate of 2000 kg/s to produce an overall heat of 201.3 MW to the combined cycle. The combined cycle delivers 133.1 MW of electric power, a heating load of 284 MW for desalination, and a heating load of 98.2 MW for residential applications. The multistage flash desalination system provides 684 kg/s of fresh water, where 32.09 kg/s is used for electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas. The hydrogen liquefaction system consists of nitrogen precooling refrigeration system, hydrogen Claude refrigeration system, and hydrogen liquefying stream. This liquefaction system produces 355 ton/day of liquefied hydrogen with SFC of 5.24 kWh/kg-LH2. The overall thermal efficiency of the integrated system is 88.12%, while the exergetic efficiency is 23.05%.