Investigation of commercial scale CSP plants performance: Effect of their installed capacity

Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are among the most promising technologies to ensure the competitiveness of solar energy systems with those based on conventional fossil sources, notably, the parabolic trough technology that has the lion’s share (73 %) of the installed CSP capacity worldwide. The correlation between their size, represented by the installed capacity, and their performance is a research area that has been insufficiently explored in the literature. Accordingly, this paper assesses the impact of the CSP plants’ size on their energy and economic performances. For this purpose, the performance of thirteen CSP plants, distributed over four regions, namely China, Morocco, South Africa and United States of America, is assessed using several key indicators based on experimental data. Additionally, several numerical simulations are performed by means of System Advisor Model software. The results show that the larger the CSP plant’s size, the higher the capacity factor. However, under specific conditions, small-size CSP plants achieve similar annual electricity production levels as medium-size ones. From an economic point of view, it is asserted that the levelized cost of energy of the studied CSP plants decreases with the increase of their sizes. Hence, this work constitutes a theoretical and practical reference to concretize the impact of CSP plants’ size on their cost-effectiveness and also to shed light on the possible optimization scenarios related to the CSP plants’ size. • Energy and economic assessment of the impact of CSP plant’s size. • 68 % of CSP plants worldwide (73 % of the installed capacity) use PTC technology. • Increasing the installed capacity augments the energy production by 74 %. • The larger the CSP plant’s size, the higher the capacity factor. • LCOE decreases with the increase of CSP plants’ sizes.