Concentrated Solar Power Plant Modeling for Power System Studies

With the continuous advancement of energy transformation, the flexibility of the power system is becoming increasingly important due to the intermittent and uncertain nature of variable renewable energy. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is an emerging reliable and dispatchable renewable generation technology that integrates “sunlight-heat-electricity” conversion, large-scale thermal energy storage, and synchronous machine characteristics. This enables CSP to provide reliable peak-shaving, inertia support, and spinning reserve services for the power system, thereby playing an increasingly significant role in achieving a highly renewable power system. Concentrated solar power (CSP) is playing a more important role in realizing a highly renewable penetrated power system. However, the lack of a suitable dynamic CSP plant model hinders its power system dynamic studies. In this article, a delicate and efficient model of a CSP plant is proposed by considering its special energy supply mode, component structure, and control system. The model can accurately reflect the influences of salt temperature on power plant dynamic characteristics at off-design conditions. Besides, a complete model parameter calculation scheme is developed to derive the model parameters from the basic physical dimensions of components and rated operation information. The performances of the proposed model and parameter calculation scheme have been fully evaluated with field data and structural information from a real-life 50MW linear Fresnel CSP plant located in northwest China. The results indicate that the proposed model can effectively simulate the dynamic behavior of the CSP plant with a low computational cost.