Fundamental Study for the Power Tower’s High Concentrated Photovoltaic/Thermal-Combined Thermal Receiver

The present study introduces fundamental aspects of a novel concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) technology. The technology is based on combining CPV/T receiver along with a solar thermal receiver. The combination is referred to as a High Concentrated Photovoltaic/Thermal - Combined receiver or HCPV/T-CT. The receiver is allocated in lieu of the conventional solar thermal receivers in the solar tower power plant schemes. The plant is designed to generate electricity and thermal energy simultaneously prior to integration with the conventional water desalination plant. The centralized generation in the CPV/T-CT receiver will remarkably simplify the complexity of the conventional solar power plants, and eliminate the piping networks’ energy losses in the CPV/T Dish tracking plants. The viability of the HCPV/T-CT power tower plant has also been investigated by; firstly, designing and simulating the plant performance using the System advisor model (SAM) software, and secondly, designing a prototype receiver and then deriving a mathematical model. The Levelised Cost Of Electricity/Energy (LCOE) was found to be 0.119 $/kWhe and 0.021 $/kWhe for electricity and energy generation, respectively, while the photovoltaic cells temperature maintained below the 90 °C.