Integrated techno-economic assessment of hybrid CSP-PV plants

Abstract

Through the integration of thermal storage and/or fossil hybridization, solar thermal power plants (CSP) enable power generation that is decoupled from fluctuating solar radiation and thus meets demand, as well as the power plant’s base load capacity. Photovoltaics (PV) has been able to significantly reduce its electricity generation costs in recent years. However, power generation from PV is dependent on the fluctuating availability of solar radiation and can therefore only contribute to a very small extent to the supply security of an energy system. In principle, photovoltaic combined-cycle power plants or virtual power plants can provide the same functionality as solar thermal power plants in terms of feeding in and providing system services as required. The PV combined cycle power plants have a battery storage and a fossil backup (gas turbine) and are operated together. In addition to the comparison of CSP and PV in order to generate electricity from solar energy, the combination of both is currently increasingly being proposed: CSP-PV combined cycle power plants. Whether this combination is particularly advantageous has not yet been scientifically investigated in depth and is part of this study. The overall objective of this work is a system-technical, economic and ecological comparison of solar thermal and photovoltaic combined cycle power plants on a power plant scale and their combinations.