Abstract
A technical and financial pre-feasibility study of a standalone concentrated solar power (CSP) plant that hasn’t been explored in the Northern Region of the state of California, was performed. This study was conducted to explore, model, simulate and demonstrate with the assistance of the software System Advisor Model (SAM), the most viable technology. Also, the possible total cost and total generation of a small-scale (10MW) designed CSP system in the Sacramento Region. For this study ten important steps listed in Chapter 2 were considered. However, the preliminary financial analysis, technology selection and financing of the solar project, were the three mains steps that were explored in depth in this thesis. To gather the needed data for the plant cost, more time was spent investigating a few subareas such as direct and indirect costs in the financing portion of the software. The summary of outputs generated by SAM, will determine if this project could potentially move on to the feasibility phase or if it is not worth the time to look into it. The results obtained from the software system SAM, showed that the resource in this region using a parabolic trough system has an annual beam irradiance of 1990 kWh/m2 or 5.4 kWh/day/m2. The annual generation for the 10 MW plant modeled was about 23GWh with a 27.2% capacity factor. The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) real and nominal are 12.35 cents/kWh and 16.22 cents/kWh, respectively. Also, the total cost for a plant with the system technology chosen was shown to be about $ 72 million, which is expensive taking into consideration the size of the plant that is being simulated and modeled. It was concluded from this study and based on the results generated, that a CSP plant in the Sacramento area can be viable. From this conclusion, the next important phase will be to perform a detailed and more complete feasibility study that will take into consideration the results that were generated in this study. On the other hand, it is important to take into consideration the suggestions exposed in Chapter 5. This will help visualize how different inputs entered in the SAM model such as state and federal grants inputs can help reduce the total cost of the plant. Also, the thermal energy storage can be analyzed by exploring the single tank thermal storage options, instead of only focusing on type of TES system such as the double tank storage system. These recommendations along with rest exposed in Chapter 5, will not only provide additional information about the plant, but they will narrow down the main characteristics and provide more accurate results that are expected for a small CSP project.