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The paper presents a comparison of terrestrial large-scale solar power plant solutions with spacebased solutions. The comparison is made in terms of total cost, cost/kWh as well as technology requirements and risk in a timescale reaching from state-of-the-art technology to foreseeable technological advances within approximately 25 years. The application focus of the paper is on the larger continental European situation.

International audience; Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy offer a large untapped potential for electricity production. The exploitation of these energies requires accurate knowledge of the resources and of their availability (in space and time) as well as accurate forecasts in the different phases of an energy system life cycle. For instance, the site selection process for development of large solar systems, such as photovoltaic on open land, require data on time-averaged values of solar irradiance from which basic economic assessments of a plant concept can be made. The paper illustrates the exploitation of Earth Observation data in this context. It describes the approach of setting-up a series of Web services that implement key features in Earth Observation data exploitation and illustrate their use through a complex application in the sitting of a solar power plant. The scenario is built on GEOSS interoperability and standard guidance.

This paper concerns the application of a neural network control strategy to the distributed collector field of a solar power plant The neural network is trained based on measured data from the plant providing a way of scheduling between a set of PID controllers, a priori timed in different operating points by means of Takahashi rules. The present work consists in a hybrid scheme combining the potentialities of neural networks for approximation purposes with the well-know theory and widespread industrial application of BID techniques. Experimental results collected at Plataforma Solar de Almeria (Spain), show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, modeling and analysis of a hybrid solar power plant are presented. Within a theoretical framework, thermodynamic modeling of several components of the cycles has been conducted throu...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the numerous revisions required for the NSTTF computer code, helios, to model a general redirector/surface-of-revolution geometry at a central-receiver-type facility. Obviously, the optical theory required to make the code modifications are extensive and laborious in detail. These details are presented in the paper.

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