Minimizing the levelized cost of electricity production from low-temperature geothermal heat sources with ORCs: Water or air cooled?

Daniël Walraven, Ben Laenen and D’haeseleer, William

Applied Energy, 2015, vol. 142, issue C, 144-153

Abstract: A system optimization of ORCs cooled by air-cooled condensers or wet cooling towers and powered by low-temperature geothermal heat sources is performed in this paper. The configuration of the ORC is optimized together with the geometry of all the components. The objective is to minimize the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and the performance of ORCs with different types of cooling systems are compared to each other. The results show that it is economically more interesting to use mechanical-draft wet cooling towers instead of air-cooled condensers. The difference in performance is especially large for a low brine-inlet temperature. The investment cost of wet cooling towers is much lower than the one of air-cooled condensers, so the discount rate has less influence on the former type of cooling. The effect of the water price and the climate conditions on the economics of ORCs is also investigated. Both the brine-inlet temperature and the dry-bulb temperature of the surroundings have a strong influence and values of the optimized LCOE between about 55 and 185€/MWh are obtained.

Keywords: ORC; Geothermal; Air-cooled condenser; Wet cooling tower; Economics; Optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191401335X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:142:y:2015:i:c:p:144-153

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2014.12.078

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().