Two-tank molten salts thermal energy storage system for solar power plants at pilot plant scale: Lessons learnt and recommendations for its design, start-up and operation

Abstract

Renewable energies are main players to ensure the long-term energy supply. Solar power plants with thermal energy storage (TES) are one of the available renewable technologies which have more potential. Nowadays, there are still several aspects in the design and operation of these power plants which need to be improved, such as the correct operation of some specific instrumentation, the compatibility between TES materials and storage tanks materials, and operational process strategies. This paper presents the acquired experience during the design, start-up, and operation of a kWh scale pilot experimental facility built at the University of Lleida (Spain) together with Abengoa Research (Spain) in 2008. The versatility of this facility has allowed simulating real working conditions and therefore testing different TES systems, TES materials, solar power plant components, and operational strategies focused on TES for temperatures up to 400 ºC. In the present paper, the authors show the lessons learnt at pilot and present the main problems and limitations encountered, and give advices of this experimental set-up to extrapolate the data to real plant, to provide solutions to technical problems and reduce the cost of commercial plants.

A Scientometric Approach to Analyze Scientific Development on Renewable Energy Sources

“…The authors Cabeza with node degree 38 and Hodge with node degree 34 are the highest in this map. Cabeza has 12 articles related to the subject of solar or photovoltaic energy, some of them being about thermal energy storage systems (Cabeza et al, 2017;Gibb et al, 2018;Jacob et al, 2016;Peiró et al, 2018;Ruiz-Cabañas et al, 2017), key performance indicators for energy storage systems (Cabeza et al, 2015), and other correlated subjects. Hodge has seven papers indexed in Scopus about high renewable power systems (Du et al, 2018;Du et al, 2019), trends in wind and solar energy forecasting technologies (Hodge et al, 2018;Orwig et al, 2015), estimation of solar irradiance (Zhang et al, 2019), and other related articles.…”

“…Journal of Data and Information Science Solar radiation is strongly connected with forecasting (Hodge et al, 2018;Orwig et al, 2015), energy storage linked to solar concentrators (Cabeza et al, 2017;Gibb et al, 2018;Jacob et al, 2016;Peiró et al, 2018;Ruiz-Cabañas et al, 2017). Other strong connections are between: energy conservation and energy utilization; energy storage and heat storage; optimization and energy resources; and photovoltaic effects and optimization.…”

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Estimation of Blockage Position, Geometry, and Solidity in Molten Salt Pipelines

“…The sun is a virtually endless source of energy and solar thermal power plants [ 1 , 2 ] have remarkable potential in the production and storage of renewable energy [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Its operation involves the use of parabolic trough solar collectors or Fresnel-type reflectors to heat a fluid to temperatures ranging usually from 200 °C to 400 °C [ 6 ].…”