Strategies in tower solar power plant optimization

A method for optimizing a central receiver solar thermal electric power plant is studied. We parametrize the plant design as a function of eleven design variables and reduce the problem of finding optimal designs to the numerical problem of finding the minimum of a function of several variables. This minimization problem is attacked with different algorithms both local and global in nature. We find that all algorithms find the same minimum of the objective function. The performance of each of the algorithms and the resulting designs are studied for two typical cases.We describe a method to evaluate the impact of design variables in the plant performance. This method will tell us what variables are key to the optimal plant design and which ones are less important. This information can be used to further improve the plant design and to accelerate the optimization procedure.

► The design of solar power plants is reduced to the choice of eleven design variables.
► We use three different algorithms (local and global) to optimize the plant design.
► We develop a method to analyze the impact of a variable in a plant performance.
► We analyze two typical plant designs with these algorithms and methods.
► The three algorithms find the same plant design. We analyze their performance.