NS Suresh

CSTEP research report.

In the race to achieve India’s National Solar Mission (NSM) targets, one important solar technology is slowly disappearing. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), a solar thermal-based technology for power generation, which showed considerable technical potential, is being sidelined. It is losing out due to economics compared to its rival, solar photovoltaics (PV).

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants require Direct Normal Solar Irradiance (DNI) data for both design and operation. The availability of DNI data, especially with closer time intervals, until 2010-12 was scarce. However, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) published a Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data on Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) and Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance (DHI). The study developed a methodology to use these GHI and DHI data and arrive at DNI.

The annual consumption of petroleum products in India was about 221 million metric tons in 2015. Of this, 84% was imported. The Indian industrial sector accounts for about 16%–20% of the total fuel consumption for thermal energy for different heating applications in the temperature range of 50°C–250 °C. Solar collectors can meet these temperature requirements and offer the possibility to mitigate the consumption of oil.

Solar tower technology has gained considerable momentum over the past decade. In a solar tower plant, a single receiver is used and the power collected by the heliostat field is strongly coupled to the tower height and its location with respect to the field. The literature available focuses largely on the component-level details of the heliostat field, ray-tracing mechanisms, receiver heat transfer analyses, etc.

A detailed methodology to design the size of solar field for a parabolic trough plant is not explicitly available in open literature, particularly if thermal storage and hybridization are also considered, as most of the papers present a gross overview.

Solar Tower technology has gained considerable momentum over the past decade .Unlike the parabolic trough, Solar Tower has a lot of variants in terms of type of receivers, working fluids, power cycles, size of heliostats, etc .Most of the literature available on this technology does not address in great depths, details of various parameters associated with tower technology.The role and significance of this technology is brought out in the context of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) in order to achieve grid-connected solar power.

A novel approach to determine the non-dimensional heliostat field boundary for solar tower plants.Solar tower technology has gained considerable momentum over the past decade. In a solar tower plant, the power collected by the heliostat field is strongly coupled to the height of the tower and its location with respect to the field. This paper provides a methodology to fix the boundary of the field (non-dimensionalised with respect to the tower height).