Impact of cost uncertainties and solar data variations on the economics of central receiver solar power plants: An Australian case study

Mehdi Aghaei Meybodi and Andrew C. Beath

Renewable Energy, 2016, vol. 93, issue C, 510-524

Abstract: Central receiver solar power plants are becoming an increasingly important technology worldwide and appear to be well suited to areas with moderate to high solar availability in Australia. However, the lack of large commercial installations in Australia results in a heavy reliance on cost and performance data from international literature when assessing possible installations. High variability in costs was found and, in combination with solar variability, this leads to considerable uncertainty when estimating the cost of electricity for potential projects. A stochastic methodology is presented that allows for changes in size of the plant, storage capacity, site location, costs of different plant items, and performance variations over the plant's lifetime. The developed methodology is used to produce a distribution of LCOE estimates. Three Australian sites, namely Alice Springs, Kalgoorlie and Mildura, are used as examples to examine the impact of changes of multiple variables on LCOE estimates. Analysis of these case studies shows a limited influence of storage capacity on LCOE, but considerably higher dependence on plant size and site selection. This suggests that the methodology could be applied to select an optimum plant design to meet specific targets or to compare the benefits of prospective projects at different sites.

Keywords: Central receiver solar plant; Stochastic analysis; Levelized cost of energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148116302002
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:renene:v:93:y:2016:i:c:p:510-524

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2016.03.016

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

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