Techno-Economic Analysis of Central Receiver Plants According to the Optical Error of the Solar Field

Among the concentrated solar power technologies (CSP), the central receiver (CR) technology is the most promissing to achieve the lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and the one expected to play one of the major roles in the energetic mix in the next years. For that purpose, succesful CR projects are needed, starting by the contruction and erection of a reliable heliostat field that fulfils its design specifications. In this work, the loss of energy production and the consequently rise of LCOE is investigated as function of the optical error of the heliostats. For that, a reference CR plant is defined in which the heliostat field layout and the receiver are optimized to collect the maximum annual energy. An aiming strategy is also implemented to obtain more realistic results. For instance, for a reasonable deviation of about 40-50% compared to the optical reference error, the annual collected energy can drop to a considerable 5%.