Questions about Power Tower Design, Heliostat Design, and CSP/PV Hybridization

Hello, I hope this post finds you well.  I'm running research on the design and building of dispatch strategies of hybrid CSP-CRS(Power Tower)/PV plants. Thus, I'm studying the operating principles of the "Detailed PV" and "Power Tower" models, even though the SAM software does not allow hybridized dispatch per se. For such a goal, I initially managed to implement a standalone PV model in Python (with both PVLIB libraries and PySAM). For the CSP part, I managed to implement it in PySAM, but as I can't change the underlying operation codes with it, I thought about using CoPylot to obtain the heliostat field layout and use the energy output from the receiver as an input to my own subsequent implementations of the CSP blocks. At this moment, I have questions about the understanding of the software:

- Does SolarPILOT/CoPylot itself allow the extraction of receiver total power output available to the rest of the system? I understand the software may use a finite number of days from the meteorological file to find the optimized heliostat field layout, but once I obtain this final layout, can this software alone calculate the losses from the receiver and let the user obtain and export the total power given by the receiver (minus piping and heat losses) over all the hourly steps from the meteorological file? I can't seem to find this kind of option in the SolarPilot Application, nor I can find it on the CoPylot. If this functionality doesn't exist in SolarPilot, how sound would it be to extract output values from the receiver power outputs from PySAM as an input to my would-be power cycle custom models?

Hi Arthur,

SolarPILOT is designed to calculate optimal field layout parameters rather than to simulate the power output of the receiver.

You could use SolarPILOT to optimize the field, and then use SAM (or PySAM) to simulate the system for receiver output calculations

Best regards,
Paul.

Hi again,

Here are a couple of comments to follow up on my response above:

SolarPILOT/CoPylot can be used to get hourly receiver heat production based on sun position and available DNI resource. To do that, you would have to step through the weather file, simulate the solar field performance, and gather the results. That requires adjusting the inputs under “Sun position” in SolarPILOT's “Performance Simulation” for each hour of the solar day. You could do this in Python with CoPylot and a For loop.

You might also be interested in some  of NREL's recent work in HOPP (Hybrid Optimization Performance Platform). It now includes CSP (tower and trough) technologies in addition to the original PV, wind, and battery technologies. HOPP optimizes sizing and dispatch of CSP, PV, and battery technologies relative to each other. The latest work on HOPP is on this GitHub branch: github.com/NREL/HOPP/tree/WB_CSP_dispatch_design and should be merged in to the main branch of HOPP in the coming months. (Some aspects of HOPP may also be integrated into the SAM desktop application in future versions.)

Best regards,
Paul.

I have found all clarifications to be very useful and helpful for my project, thank you very much!