Thermo Mechanical Solar Power Plants

In this book, the Commission of the European Communities presents the proceedings of the Workshop on Solar Central Receiver Projects, held in Varese, I taly , in June 1984. This Workshop was supported by all operators of solar tower power plants around the world and, as a result, these proceedings provide a comprehensive overview of the technology in its current state of development. The Workshop was organized by the Commission of the European Communities in the frame of the second solar energy R&D programme under the responsibility of its Di rectorate-General (X 11) for Science, Research and Development in Brussels. The meeting place, Varese, in Italy, was selected because of its neighbourhood to the Ispra Establishment of the Commission's Joint Research Centre who cooperated in the organization of the Workshop. Solar power plants of the central receiving type have two conflicting characteristics: they employ very simple and classical components but as a system they are of tremendous complexity. It was the hope for rapid progress by using available components that guided the decisions taken in the late seventies to build six large experimental plants: four in Europe, one in Japan and one in the United States. At that time, this technology enjoyed high priority in solar energy R&D around the world. Once the plants were completed, however, it became clear that the technical complexity combined with difficult meteorological conditions at most construction sites made the yields less favourable than anticipated.

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Design, Construction and Operation of Solar Central Receiver Projects, Varese, Italy, June 4-8, 1984

1. 1 Historical Background and Relationship to the lEA One of the objectives of the energy research, development and demonstra tion program of the International Energy Agency (lEA) is to promote the development and application of new and improved energy technologies which could potentially help cover our energy needs. Early in 1976, a working party for Small Solar Power Systems (SSPS) was created with the approval and encouragement of the Committee for Research and Develop ment of the International Energy Agency (lEA) [1]. At that time the following countries showed interest in attending the formative meeting: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Great Britain, Greece, The Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America. In its first meetings the SSPS Working Party explored the technological possibilities of the exploitation of solar power at small levels (photovoltaics, wind, waves and thermal power conversion) and also reviewed what was being done at that time in the domain of solar power in each of the participating countries. At a meeting in mid 1976 in Vienna, a study performed by MBB was presented. It stated that as distributed systems (systems using a large number of parabolic trough collectors "DCS", see chapter 4) grow linearly in terms of power, the associated costs grow as a function of the size of the intended system. By comparison, the cost per unit output of the central receiver systems ("CRS" , see section 5.