Concentrated Solar Power Plant for Key Locations in Doha Qatar

Abstract

One of the pillars of the Qatar National Vision 2030 is the protection and preservation of the environment by decreasing the dependency on hydrocarbon resources and promoting the use and development of renewable energy sources. Moreover, Qatar is located within the sun belt region of the world which receives abundant solar radiation. Thus, solar renewable energy technologies and concentrating solar power (CSP) has a good potential for producing green energy in Qatar. In this thesis, a CSP power tower plant located in Al-Safliya island is designed to power Al-Jasra and Msheireb down town Doha city zones. These two key locations in Doha are with high electricity demand potential. One of the most famous Souqs in Qatar, Souq Waqif, is in Al-Jasra zone. The suggested location of the CSP plant offers a site that is less than 10 km in distance from the targeted zones which means less transmission losses and transmission route cost. Moreover, the location is very near from Hamad International Airport and it can be easily seen during the departures and arrivals flights. The study is based on an actual electrical consumption of more than 600 shops of the Souq measured on year 2014 and 2015. In the CSP technology side, the four main technologies are studied with more focus on the solar tower technology. The main components of this technology are reviewed as well. As a part of the literature review, a data base for all the CSP projects around the world is made and a Microsoft Excel model for calculating the available solar irradiance in any location of the world is prepared. Two softwares are used in this project, SolarPILOT and System Advisor Model (SAM). Both softwares are validated with a recent power tower project. The result of the study is a CSP project with more than 0.45 km2 of a solar field area with 2736 heliostats that produces 8 MWe with 10 hours of thermal storage with hybrid steam condensing system. The water that is required for the plant operation is extracted and desalinated from the surrounded sea using a water treatment system based on a reverse osmosis system. The total electrical production of the plant is found to be 37,904,830 kWh with excess of electrical energy of 28,845,986 kWh, after subtracting the consumption of Souq Waqif. The total system installed cost is found to be $ 84,069,896. It is broken down as total direct capital cost of $ 73,395,696 and total indirect cost of $ 10,674,192. The estimated total installed cost per net capacity is found to be $11,120/kW. Finally, one of the main future recommendations is to build an immediate solar and weather station in the state to measures the actual three solar components of the available solar irradiance on both horizontal and dual axes tracking surface.