Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 113, 2019
SUPEHR19 SUstainable PolyEnergy generation and HaRvesting Volume 1
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 03021 | |
Number of page(s) | 9 | |
Section | Energy Micropolygeneration and Harvesting | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/201911303021 | |
Published online | 21 August 2019 |
Techno-economic analysis of multipurpose OTEC power plants
1
University of Genoa, Department of Mechanical Engineering (DIME), Thermochemical Power Group, Via Montallegro 1, 16145 Genova, Italy.
2
WavEC – Offshore Renewables, Rua Jerónimo Osório 11, 1400-119 Lisboa, Portugal
* Corresponding author: barberis.ste@gmail.com
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a promising technology to provide sustainable and dispatchable energy supply to oceanic coastal areas and islands. It exploits the temperature difference between deep cold ocean water and warm tropical surface water in an Organic RankineCycle (ORC), guaranteeing a continuous and dispatchable electric production, overcoming one ofthe most critical issue of renewable generators such as PV or wind turbines. Despite the technological maturity of ORC application to OTEC systems, it still presents technical and economicbarriers mainly related to their economic feasibility, large initial investments as well as heavy and time demanding civil installation works. To overcome such issues, multipurpose OTEC plants are proposed, producing electrical power as well as other products, such as useful thermal power (e.g. ambient cooling) and desalinated water. Since OTEC engineering is still at a lowdegree of maturity, there are no widespread and established tools to facilitate OTEC feasibility studies and to allow performance and cost optimization. Therefore, in this paper, a new tool for techno-economic analysis and optimization of multipurpose OTEC plants is presented. Starting from a detailed database of local water temperature and depth, the approach allows to provide a quantitative insight on the achievable performance, required investment, and expected economic returns, allowing for a preliminary but robust assessment of site potential as well as plant size. After the description of the techno-economic approach and related performance and cost functions, the tool is applied to an OTEC power plant case study in the range of 1 MW gross electrical power, including a preliminary assessment of scaling-up effects.
Key words: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion / Sea energy / Polygeneration / Oraganic Rankine Cycle
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.