Solar power generation and solar cooling trigeneration: A new approach of conceptual design for countries of MENA regions

Abstract

The rapid increase in population, industrial and agricultural developments in countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has resulted in proportional increase in demand for electric power. This demand increases sharply during the summer months due to the use of electricity-powered Air Conditioning (AC) systems. The usual response to this problem is to build new, time-consuming and costly power generation plants. Trigeneration or combined heat, power and cooling represents a great opportunity for the Sunbelt countries, especially in the MENAregion. The potential application covers not only the construction industry and the service sector, but also the industry, agribusiness and agriculture sectors. Specifically, we show the possibility to design a basic concept that meets all the requirements and which optimally adapts to all cultural, regulatory and economic considerations according to the studied country and the site of realization in question. We propose in this study the use of the solar thermal for heating, power generation and building cooling. The new developed solar-based technology is capable of producing power via Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and absorption or adsorption cooling as a byproduct/cogeneration operated by the rejected heat from the ORC. We consider also the possibility of using ice storage technology which is much cheaper than steam storage. This way, autonomous power generation and cooling (AC) can be installed in locations remote from the electricity grid, resulting in huge savings in both power transmission lines and added power capacity. We present practical results and we describe our conceptual approaches and modeling. The developed parametric model is applied to various design cases, generated from the baseline concept, and then validated by comparison with experimental approaches. We note that our model is also used to predict the future facilities operations. Thereafter, we present our current projects and test stands in two countries in the MENA region.