Abstract:
Solar energy is the energy that is produced by the sun in the form of heat and light. It is one of the most renewable and readily available source of energy on the earth. Solar power is the conversion of sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaic (PV), or indirectly using concentrated solar power (CSP). CSP systems use lenses or mirrors and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. A solar power tower is also called as a ‘Central Tower’ or ‘Heliostat’ power plants. It is basically a kind of solar operated plant that utilizes a tower design to focus the sunlight incident on it. The mirrors focus the sunlight onto a central tower acting as the receiver.
2015 - 2020, Ethiopia has plans to increase its electricity generation capacity from the current 4,400 MW to around 17,300 MW, most of it from wind, geothermal and hydro energy. Within this plan the Ethiopian government sees the construction of three solar power plants, each generating 100 MW as one of the basic aims. But this is not enough within the potential of solar energy in Ethiopia.
This project concerns the people living in Qunzila (50 Km from Bahir Dar). In that place there is Tana Beles hydro-electric power generation plant but still now Qunzila’s peoples does not gate electric power. The main objective of this project is designing and modelling of solar tower with thermal energy storage system for grid electric power generation.
In this thesis work data is collected from Ethiopian meteorology agency which is global horizontal irradiation (GHI) data but this data is not applicable for concentrated type solar collectors. Therefore this data was converted primarily and selected the Hellas 1 type heliostat by considering the reflectivity of the glass. The total area of the heliostat is 8131.398 m2 and 424 heliostats are needed to generate that amount of power. But the total area needed for this project is 41,440.34m2.
The height of the tower that the receiver will appear is 46.41 m and the material of the tower is free standing steel. The receiver is place at the top of the tower and have 1.075 m height and 1.29 m diameter. The hot storage tank is designed to store for 16 hours because the effective sunshine
MIKAEL BETSEHA VII
DESIGN AND MODELLING OF SOLAR TOWER POWER PLANT WITH THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEM
hour of this place is 8 hours. To store for this amount of time the size of the tank is 202.21 m3 in volume means the height and the diameter is 5.78 m