Economic Analysis And Development Policies Research On Concentrating Solar Power Industry

In order to relieve the environment pressure brought by fossil energy and the crisis caused by fossil energy reserves,countries all over the world have taken measures to strengthen the development and utilization of renewable clean energy.Concentrating solar power(CSP)is of great advantage in environmental protection and energy conservation.CSP plants with thermal storage systems and fuel-powered backup systems can solve output instability caused by intermittent characteristics of solar energy.However,high power generation cost of CSP has no competitive advantage in the electricity market compared with traditional power generation.Therefore,the analysis on CSP generation cost composition and cost reduction space is crucial for promoting CSP industry.Moreover,researches about the promotion effects of different development policies on CSP industry are of great significance to the formulation and improvement of policies.LCOE model is applied in this paper to analyze CSP industry's economics.The parameters considering the actual CSP project are assumed to construct LCOE model.Taking a parabolic trough plant with 7 hours thermal storage system as an example,this paper calculates its LCOE under the given parameters.The results show that when internal rate of return is 8%,the project's LCOE equals to 1.173 RMB/kWh.Next,the sensitivity analysis is performed to dissect the influence of different parameters on the LCOE.According to the sensitivity analysis results,the utilization hours is the most sensitive,the unit investment is next and the discount rate and the equity fund proportion are less sensitive.Finally,system dynamics model is established under four policy scenarios to simulate the development of CSP cumulative installed capacity,unit investment and utilization hours.LCOE under different scenarios is calculated based on the simulation results.The economic analysis results show that CSP industry is faced with the problems of high investment cost and high generation cost.Even under the fixed price subsidy mechanism,the benefits of CSP projects are still poor.Utilization hours and unit investment have the most serious impact on the LCOE.Therefore,improving CSP power curtailment and reducing unit investment are effective approaches to achieve the decline of CSP project's LCOE.The simulation results of development policies indicates that the generation cost and power curtailment issues have been effectively improved and CSP industry develops rapidly.