CSP+MED Plant Coupled to a Seawater Pipeline from the Mining Industry in Northern Chile: A Case Study

Abstract

The study evaluated the use of mining seawater pipelines in a CSP+MED plant at commercial scale based on solar tower molten salts technology, with 111.2 MWe and 13 hours of thermal energy storage in northern Chile. The plant is coupled to the biggest seawater pipeline in the country, from Centinela mining facility. Results shown that the CSP+MED plant required all the seawater pumping capacity of the pipeline in order to cool the thermal cycle of the CSP plant using the MED plant. In terms of electricity production, the MED plant integration affects significantly the annual electricity production of the plant, when compared with an optimized CSP plant and to a CSP plant with the same design but without the MED plant and considering a once through cooling system, lowering the electricity production an 46.05% and 25.82% respectively. On the other hand, the CSP+MED plant integration produces 14.06 hm³ of freshwater annually, which translated in an additional income equivalent to 28.14 MM USD each year, which is substracted from the OPEX costs of the plant for the LCoE calculations. For this reason, the results showed that the lowest LCoE is reached by the CSP+MED plant configuration, but is highlighted that the economic analysis assumed an ideal situation, and further business models must be studied in order to share the benefits of the seawater pipeline integration between the CSP+MED plant owner and the mining facility that owns the seawater pipeline.