A co-powered Concentrated Solar Power concept for small size combined Heat and Power

The present work investigates the matching of an advanced small scale combined heat and power Rankine cycle plant to end-user thermal and electric load. The power plant consists of a concentrated solar power field co-powered by a biomass furnace to produce steam in a Rankine cycle, with a Combined Heat and Power configuration. A hotel was selected as the end user. The power plant design and its operation were modelled and investigated by adopting transient simulations wit h a hourly distribution. The study of the load matching of the proposed renewable power technology and the final user has been carried out by comparing two different load tracking scenarios, i.e. the thermal and the electric demands. As a result, the power output follows fairly well the given load curves, supplying, on a selected winter day, about 50 GJ/d of thermal energy and the 6 GJ/d of electric energy, with reduced energy dumps when matching the load. Furthermore, for the same winter day, the system allows the reduction of about 4-103 kgCO2 of greenhouse gas emissions.