CSP PTC plant efficiency

Lukas Richter
Topic Author

30 May 2019 05:08 #7332 by Lukas Richter

CSP PTC plant efficiency was created by Lukas Richter

Hello,

I am just getting started with SAM, so my question may be a bit stupid, for which I am apologizing. Nevertheless I would like to ask you how to get the overall efficiency of a CSP parabolic trough power plant. I would expect values somewhere between 20-30% and I cannot find this within the evaluation of simulation results. The capacity factor is not efficiency, is it? Thank you for your advice.

Lukas

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Paul Gilman

30 May 2019 10:40 #7341 by Paul Gilman

Replied by Paul Gilman on topic CSP PTC plant efficiency

Hi Lukas,

SAM does not report an overall system efficiency. The capacity factor is one measure of the system's efficiency, which SAM calculates as

Code:

Capacity Factor = Net Annual Energy (kWhac/yr) / System Capacity (kWdc or kWac) / 8760 (h/yr)

You could use the data on the Statistics tab of the Results page to calculate the efficiency of different parts of the plant. For example, to calculate the overall incident irradiance to net electrical output, you could divide the sum of "System power generated" by "Field thermal power incident after cosine".

Best regards,
Paul.

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