Base load power plant

About: Base load power plant is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6121 publications have been published within this topic receiving 96788 citations.

Power Tower Technology Roadmap and Cost Reduction Plan

Abstract: Concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies continue to mature and are being deployed worldwide. Power towers will likely play an essential role in the future development of CSP due to their potential to provide dispatchable solar electricity at a low cost. This Power Tower Technology Roadmap has been developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to describe the current technology, the improvement opportunities that exist for the technology, and the specific activities needed to reach the DOE programmatic target of providing competitively-priced electricity in the intermediate and baseload power markets by 2020. As a first step in developing this roadmap, a Power Tower Roadmap Workshop that included the tower industry, national laboratories, and DOE was held in March 2010. A number of technology improvement opportunities (TIOs) were identified at this workshop and separated into four categories associated with power tower subsystems: solar collector field, solar receiver, thermal energy storage, and power block/balance of plant. In this roadmap, the TIOs associated with power tower technologies are identified along with their respective impacts on the cost of delivered electricity. In addition, development timelines and estimated budgets to achieve cost reduction goals are presented. The roadmap does not present a single path formore » achieving these goals, but rather provides a process for evaluating a set of options from which DOE and industry can select to accelerate power tower R&D, cost reductions, and commercial deployment.« less

Optimized Thermal and Electrical Scheduling of a Large Scale Virtual Power Plant in the Presence of Energy Storages

Abstract: Smart grids are often analyzed using a top-down approach, i.e., starting from communication and control technologies evolution, to then focus on their effects on active and passive users, in terms of new services, higher efficiency and quality of supply. However, with their bottom-up approach, virtual power plants (VPP) are very promising instruments for promoting an effective integration of distributed generation (DG) and energy storage devices as well as valid means for enabling consumers to respond to load management signals, when operated under the supervision of a scheduling coordinator. These aggregation factors can be very profitable for the distributed energy resources (DERs) economy and for the energy network itself. This paper presents a new algorithm to optimize the day-ahead thermal and electrical scheduling of a large scale VPP (LSVPP) which contains: a) many small-scale producers and consumers (“prosumers”) distributed over a large territory and b) energy storage and cogeneration processes. The algorithm also takes into account the actual location of each DER in the public network and their specific capability. Thermal and electrical generator models, load and storage devices are very detailed and flexible, as are the rates and incentives framework. Several novelties, with respect to the previous literature, are proposed. Case study results are also described and discussed.

Edison Redux: 380 Vdc Brings Reliability and Efficiency to Sustainable Data Centers

Abstract: We are on the cusp of a great technology transition in power distribution from ac to dc at the edge of the grid Data centers are merely one of the first industries to embrace the coming tide The transition on the customer side of the meter is on the order of what happened over the last 40 years with personal computers, the Internet, and cell phones The predominant use of power electronics in almost everything we buy new today makes them natively dc devices As a society, we could be more efficient and sustainable if we were to skip the last ac-to-dc conversion At some point soon, when the majority of the load base is natively dc, we reach a tipping point where ac and hot power converter “bricks” on everything are no longer sustainable Add to this distributed generation, distributed energy storage, and renewable carbon-free power sources that prefer dc, and one can conclude that the transition is not only necessary but inevitable