SMARTCSP: INDUSTRY 4.0 APPROACH FOR AN EFFECTIVE CONCENTRATED SOLAR POWER (CSP) COST REDUCTION

Abstract

Today, Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants and components incorporate a low degree of intelligence and autonomy that makes it expensive and makes quality control difficult. The degree of automation of CSP plants is low; the development of protocols, procedures and standards to ensure quality control during assembly, construction, commissioning and operation of the plant are still in their early stages. Meanwhile, Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm are the key technological breakthroughs for the manufacturing industry since the last century; and such can be SMARTCSP for the CSP since its commercial inception 50 years ago. SMARTCSP benefits from this experience in the application of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) or Lean Manufacturing in mature industrial fields such as automotive or manufacturing to create a new generation of SMARTCSP Components that include a full set of relevant functionalities right from the production line. SMARTCSP will provide higher levels of distributed intelligence, autonomy and decision making in CSP plants through distributed and miniaturized processors, sensors, and communications embedded in CSP components. Moreover, a new CSP plant concept is proposed that allows for an optimized operation and maintenance of the plant. All this entails the first step towards the crystallization of the Industry 4.0 paradigm in the field of CSP technologies.