规模、储热容量和热传输损失对利用聚光太阳能热能供应高温工业过程热的 techno-economics 影响

Abstract The first comprehensive techno-economic analysis of the supply of high temperature heat for an industrial process with concentrating solar thermal energy in a way that accounts for resource variability and also includes all aspects of the full system, including solar input thermal scale, thermal storage and transmission pipe-line. For the present system, air was chosen as the heat transfer fluid (HTF) to allow retrofitting into an existing alumina plant, although future systems could further lower costs with the use of different media. Costs were based on current construction costs in Australia for a first-of-a-kind system (FOAK), yet to include the learning rate for cost reduction. Even for this case, it is estimated that the cost of energy from concentrated solar is ∼27USD/GJ. This techno-economic assessment of delivering high-temperature industrial process heat using concentrated solar thermal technology (CST) identified strong potential for the technology to contribute net-zero emission energy sources for high temperature industrial process at cost-competitive prices. These price estimates were obtained from a model of a full system using air as the heat transfer fluid to be compatible with current industrial processes, comprising a solar expanding-vortex receiver at scales between 50 and 450 MW th , packed-bed thermal storage and a combustion backup, together with a thermal transmission system to transport the hot air to and from the process. The system was modelled with a transient solar input with one year of resource variability solved in 10-minute time intervals and a solar multiple SM = 2.5. Both the levelised cost of heat (LCOH) and the efficiency of the CST system ( η ann , C S T ) were calculated for systematic variation of the input solar scale at design point ( Q ̇ sol , D P ), transmission distance ( L tr ), effectiveness of the transmission and storage and storage capacity. Optimal combinations of the storage capacity, effectiveness of the transmission and storage were calculated for each chosen value of input solar scale, based on the LCOH. This reveals various trade-offs between the fraction of heat that can be supplied with the CST system and the cost of investment in the size and the amount of insulation chosen for both the storage and transmission systems. Furthermore, while the optimal combination of any of these parameters changes with each sub-system, an overall trend between the LCOH was derived for all scenarios. The results estimate that high temperature air at 1100 °C can be delivered by CST at a scale of 450 MW th over 1 km distance with LCOH below 29 USD/GJ, based on the FOAK design. In addition, if the CST system can be co-located with the process demand with less than 125 m apart, the LCOH can be reduced to ∼27 USD/GJ. Finally, 2 correlation equations to estimate the LCO H min of CST system with scale between 50 and 450 MW th and SM = 2.5 are proposed for the suitable condition of storage and transmission system, which can be used as a reference for estimating the viability of alternative configurations of CST systems.