Comparison of Heat Transfer Fluid and Direct Steam Generation technologies for Integrated Solar Combined Cycles

Abstract At present time and in the medium term, Solar Thermal Power Plants are going to share scenario with conventional energy generation technologies, like fossil and nuclear. In such a context, Integrated Solar Combined Cycles (ISCCs) may be an interesting choice since integrated designs may lead to a very efficient use of the solar and fossil resources. In this work, different ISCC configurations including a solar field based on parabolic trough collectors and working with the so-called Heat Transfer Fluid (HTF) and Direct Steam Generation (DSG) technologies are compared. For each technology, four layouts have been studied: one in which solar heat is used to evaporate part of the high pressure steam of a bottoming Rankine cycle with two pressure levels, another that incorporates a preheating section to the previous layout, the third one that includes superheating instead of preheating and the last one including both preheating and superheating in addition to the evaporation. The analysis is made with the aim of finding out which of the different layouts reaches the best performance. For that purpose, three types of comparisons have been performed. The first one assesses the benefits of including a solar steam production fixed at 50 MW th . The second one compares the configurations with a standardised solar field size instead of a fixed solar steam production. Finally, the last one consists on an even more homogeneous comparison considering the same steam generator size for all the configurations as well as standardised solar fields. The configurations are studied by mean of exergy analyses. Several figures of merit are used to correctly assess the configurations. Results reveal that the only-evaporative DSG configuration becomes the best choice, since it benefits of both low irreversibility at the heat recovery steam generator and high thermal efficiency in the solar field.