The total power generation of SUPCON SOLAR Delingha 50MW CSP Tower Plant was 12.773GWh in February 2022, with achieving rate of 98.53%. Since September 2021, the total power generation during the last six months reached 92.456 GWh, with an average achieving rate of 101.12%.
The operation records show that there are 28 days in February 2022 and 25 days were actual operation days, the total DNI of the project location was 179.85kWh/㎡. The theoretical power generation is 12.963 GWh, the actual power generation is 12.773 GWh, and the monthly achieving rate is 98.53%. Compared with the previous months, the weather of this month was more complicated, which had a greater impact on the power generation and the power generation achieving rate. There were 4 days of snow and frost in this month, which led to melt the snow and frost for the heliostats before the concentrating and heat collection system was put into operation. According to statistics, this factor led to a decrease of 0.182 GWh of power generation in the month. In addition, there were many cloudy days in this month, and the heat collection is insufficient. In order to minimize the number of starts and stops of the steam turbine, the steam turbine had to run at low loads for a long time, which also had a certain impact on the power generation efficiency. Even so, there were still 10 days in this month that the daily achieving rate exceeded 100%.
In the past six months, the plant has been operating in good conditions. From August 26, 2021 to February 28, 2022 (The power meter reading cycle by electric power company was changed as the period from the first day to the last day of each month since 2022.), a total of 187 days, in 17 days among which the plant failed to operate due to cloudy weather, the plant actually operated for 170 days, and there was no downtime due to equipment failures, and there were 103 days with a single-day achieving rate of more than 100%. The total DNI was 1197.36KWh/㎡, the theoretical power generation is 91.434 GWh, the actual power generation is 92.456 GWh, and the average achievement rate is 101.12%. The power generation in the half-year period has reached 63.3% of the annual design power generation (146 GWh).
Monthly Performance of Delingha 50MW CSP Plant
The power generation of a CSP plant is affected by many factors such as the installed capacity, energy storage capacity, heliostat field reflection area, weather conditions, etc. Therefore, the operation performance of a CSP plant can not be evaluated only by the power generation, but by several aspects.
First of all, the designed power generation of a CSP plant directly depends on factors such as the installed capacity, energy storage time, and heliostat field reflection area. For example, SUPCON SOLAR Delingha 50MW Molten Salt Tower CSP Plant is installed with a 7-hour energy storage time and heliostat field reflection area of 542,700 square meters, and the designed annual power generation is 146 GWh. Under the same conditions, if the installed capacity is changed into 100MW with a 12-hour energy storage time, the heliostat field reflection area is about 1.4 million square meters, the designed annual power generation is more than 380 GWh.
Therefore,the difference between the actual power generation and the designed power generation is the most important index to evaluate the performance of the CSP plant. At the same time, the actual weather conditions often deviate from the design assumptions, so the achieving rate (The ratio of actual power generation to theoretical power generation which calculated by performance model according to actual weather conditions) is an important measure of the operation performance of the CSP plant in the industry. In the EPC contracts of CSP plants around the world, the achieving rate is the most important basis for the performance assessment.
SUPCON SOLAR Delingha 50MW Molten Salt Tower CSP Plant, one of China's CSP Demonstration projects, is installed with a 7-hour molten salt storage system and designed to generate 146GWh electricity annually. The project is designed and constructed based on Cosin Solar's fully patented technologies, over 95% equipment are domestically sourced.
