The provision of a sustainable energy supply is one of the most important issucs

facng humanity at the current time,and solar thermal power has estsblished
itself as one of the more viable sources of renewable energy.The dispatchable
nature of the technology makes it ideally suited to forming the backbone of a
future low-carbon electricity system.
However,the cost of electricity from contemporary soler thermal power plants
remains high,despite several decade of development,and a step-change in
technolgyes needed to drive down costs.solar gas turbine power plants are a
promising new alternative,alloeing increased convention efficiencies and a
significant reduction in water consumption. Hybrid operation is further attractive
feature of solar gas turbine technology,facilitating control and ensuring the
power plants is available to meet demand wheneverit occurs.
Constucyion of the first generation of commetial hybrid solar gas turbine power
pants is complicated by the lack of an established,power plants
configuration,which present the designer with a large number of choices. To
assist decision making,thermoeconomic studies have been performed on a
variety of a different power plant configuration,including simple and combined
cycles as well as the addition of thermal energy storage. Multi objective
optimization ha been used to identify pareto optimal designs and highlights
trade offs between costs and emission.
Analysis of the simple cycle hybrid solar gas turbines revealed that while
electricity costs were kept low,the achievable reduction in carbone dioxide
emission is relatively small. Fuethermore ,aninhirengt trade off between the
design of high efficiency and high solar share hybrid power plants was
identified.Even with the use of new opimised designs,the degree of solar
integration into the gas turbine did not exceed 63%on a annual basis.