Combining WTE and Solar Power – New Solutions for Sustainable Energy Generation

This paper discusses innovations in connection with energy generation in concentrated solar thermal power plants (CSP). The basic idea was combining waste-to-energy plants with CSP. There are different ways of implementing WTE-CSP hybrid power plants. In this paper solar tower technology is used by way of example for the CSP part. Given that the steam parameters are similar to those of a WTE plant, a concept such as this has both technical and economic advantages in comparison with separate plants. These include: ï‚· Increasing the efficiency of waste-to-energy plants in sun-rich regions, ï‚· Synergy effects for the water-steam circuit and steam turbine and ï‚· No losses due to start-up, shutdown and downtimes of the solar tower power plant. Two different combination concepts were drawn up: "steam-side combination" and "solar su-perheating". Both concepts were investigated with and without heat-storage systems. The differ-ent concepts were assessed by simulating the hybrid power plant processes, making an economic efficiency calculation and comparing the four combination concepts.