Optimal condition-based cleaning of solar power collectors

The methodology has been applied to a case study on a hypothetical plant in Brisbane, Australia. Using publicly available electricity price and weather data, the optimized CBC policy was found to save 5-30% of total cleaning costs compared with a fixed-time strategy. Importantly, higher CBC savings are achieved when the direct cleaning costs are high, indicating that the policy could be particularly significant for countries with high labor or resource (water, etc.) costs (e.g. Australia). Though applied to CSP in this study, the methodology is also applicable to optimal cleaning of other solar collectors (e.g. photovoltaic collectors), albeit with different efficiency models.