Sensitivity Analysis of the Levelized Cost of Electricity for a Particle-Based CSP systemLuis F. González-Portillo, Jeremy Sment, Kevin Albrecht, Brantley Mills, Clifford K. Ho&nbsp;The U.S. Department of Energy goal for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants is to produce electricity at a cost below $0.05/kWh by 2030. As an interim goal, the SunShot and Gen 3 programs specified a goal of $0.06/kWh by 2020. Although several system configurations are proposed for this purpose, this study focuses on a particle-based concept to provide 100 MWe of power with a ~700 MWt falling particle receiver, a 240 MWt particle-to-supercritical CO2 heat exchanger, and two 14-hour ground-based storage bins. The effects of various cost and performance uncertainties on the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) are analyzed in this study. &nbsp;Previous technoeconomic analyses show that the CSP system with one particle receiver facing north and two ground-based storage bins can produce electricity at a cost below $0.06/kWh [1]. The model was created by Albrecht et al. in 2019 [2] and has been improved since then [1]. The energy models of the different system components has been benchmarked against CFD simulations to prove its accuracy [1]. However, most of the cost models have high uncertainty, which is propagated into the estimated LCOE.This study presents a sensitivity analysis of the LCOE for the G3P3 system with the most current components costs. New models for the primary heat exchanger and for the tower are presented and used to establish lower and upper bounds for these two components. Moreover, important costs such as particle cost, cavity cost, lift cost and balance of power are set to lower and upper bounds estimating a 25% of uncertainty. Besides the new cost models, this study also includes an upgrade to the receiver model to include the wind effect in the efficiency, which was not included in previous publications. Results show that the LCOE of $0.06/kWh can still be achieved, and a probabilistic analysis provides a cumulative distribution function for a range of LCOE values.Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology &amp; Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.&nbsp;References1. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; González-portillo, L.F.; Albrecht, K.; Ho, C.K. Improvements in the Techno-Economic Analysis of Particle CSP Systems. In Proceedings of the SolarPACES2020; Virtual Congress, 2020.2. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Albrecht, K.J.; Bauer, M.L.; Ho, C.K. Parametric analysis of particle CSP system performance and cost to intrinsec particle properties and operating conditions. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Energy and Sustainability; 2019.&nbsp;

Sensitivity Analysis of the Levelized Cost of Electricity for a Particle-Based Csp System

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2021/volume/84881

ASME 2021 Energy Sustainability (ES2021)

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