ACWA Power’s CSP Performance Assessment

An Online Simulation Platform for ACWA Power’s CSP Plants

Abstract

A CSP Plant and in particular the solar field has hundreds of thousands of components and the corresponding process parameters. This needs to be monitored and evaluated every day to make sure that the plant is working efficiently. A performance assessment with a production simulation is done daily where the expected and actual power production are compared. Such evaluation is usually done with the plant performance model and the necessary data is compiled in calculation programs like Excel. The work is repetitive, time consuming and human errors may easily occur. Typically, the evaluations are done from different parties with deviating results and conclusions. ACWA Power has developed an online simulation platform to automatize the data processing to increase the data reliability and reduce the time effort. The application has been implemented in the Noor Energy 1 hybrid solar plant in Dubai and shall be presented in this paper.