Performance assessment of solar thermal power plants: A case study in Queensland

Recent and ongoing improvements make the concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) as one of the promising sources to replace fossil fuel based power plants. CSP plants are already commercially being exploited in some countries such as Spain and USA. Australia is also expecting increasing penetration of CSP in near future in order to meet the renewable energy target of 20% by 2020. Among the states and territories of Australia, Queensland is one of the promising states for the large-scale deployment of CSP plants. In such a case, it is important to analyze the performance of different CSP technologies in Queensland´s climatic condition. Therefore, this paper compares the performance of four available large-scale CSP technologies at some potential sites for CSP deployment in Queensland. The aim of this paper is to report the performance of these technologies by means of output analysis. The effects of different design parameters on the performance are also analyzed and reported in this paper.