(242h) Economic Analysis and Environmental Impact of a Novel Solar Parabolic Trough Plant Used for Industrial Process Heat That Utilizes Flexible Heat Integration

Despite industrial process heat representing a large portion of the world’s energy consumption, solar industrial process heat (SIPH) provides a very small percentage of supplied process heat worldwide. SIPH plants have found to vary if they are financially viable for different cases and applications [1-2], but have an environmental benefit by reducing fossil fuel emissions from traditional energy sources. Because of this, more research is needed in analyzing the environmental benefits of SIPH in tandem with their economic viability to enable ways for SIPH to become more common.

This study focuses on an economic analysis and environmental impact of a novel SIPH plant that utilizes flexible heat integration (FHI) (see Figure 1). FHI has been studied in solar thermal power plant applications [3-5], but its application is novel for SIPH. Flexible heat integration allows for more degrees of freedoms in solar thermal plants, allowing the plant to respond optimally to changing weather conditions. In the novel SIPH plant proposed, the heat transfer fluid (HTF) setpoint and the ratio of HTF flow going to high and low temperature heat exchangers are allowed to be manipulated based on a heuristic optimization scheme. Economic analysis of this SIPH plant is conducted for two cases, a plant that doesn’t include FHI as well as a plant that utilizes optimized FHI. Results show a lower levelized cost of heat (LCOH) by implementing FHI and a quicker return on investment by offsetting natural gas usage. An environmental impact is also conducted showing a large reduction in emissions for both SIPH cases, with a larger reduction coming from the optimized FHI case. This highlights that through an economic and environmental lens, SIPH plants utilizing FHI can help to push more renewable energy in industrial process heat applications.

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