Research on Locating and Sizing of Concentrating Solar Power Plant with Electric Heater

As a new form of renewable energy generation, concentrating solar power (CSP) is more competitive owing to its generation stability and excellent dispatch-ability. As the Delingha project in Qinghai is successfully connected to the grid, the capacity of CSP will grow rapidly in the future, an effective method is essential to guide its planning. In this paper, the locating and sizing of CSP plant with electric heater (EH) is studied. Firstly, the data-driven K-means multi-scenario clustering method is used to characterize the uncertainty of wind power, photovoltaics and load. With the goal of achieving a trade-off between the total investment and benefits, a planning model based on the realistic operation situation is established. IEEE RTS-24 bus system is selected as an example for analysis and verification. The results show that the proposed method can lead to a tradeoff between economical profit and new energy consumption. Furthermore, the configuration of EH and the increase of TES capacity significantly reduce the energy curtailment.