Optimal operation in solar trough plants: A case study

•Solar energy use has increased considerably in the last decade.•One of the main challenges identified by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering is to make solar energy economical.•Advanced control techniques can be useful to improve the performance of solar systems.•This paper presents a procedure to optimize the operation of trough solar plants.

One of the most important challenges in the use of solar energy is to make it economical. This can be done by reducing investment and operating costs and by increasing solar plants performance. This paper presents a three-layer hierarchical control strategy to optimize the operation of solar trough plants. The first layer deals with the operational planning of the solar plant and it computes the electrical power to be produced and delivered. The second layer computes the optimal set-point for the solar plant, aiming at producing the electrical power provided by the first layer and optimizing the economic profit. The third layer addresses the problem of tracking the set-point calculated by the second layer. A model of the Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA) solar trough plant is used to illustrate the proposed algorithm. Simulations show that important increments in electricity production are obtained by using the proposed control scheme.