The Interrelation between Recurrent and Capital Costs in a Solar Thermal Process Heat System

The effect of operation and maintenance (O&M) costs on energy produced by solar collector systems is crucial to the market penetration of solar process heat as an alternative energy source. In the present paper, a particular O&M operation, regular collector cleaning, is considered in order to determine its effect upon annualized life cycle energy cost. A first-order model of mirror reflectance degradation as a function of time is constructed from experimental data taken at Albuquerque, N.M. This is used as input to a systems optimization model of a line-focus solar collector process heat installation. The energy cost variation is considered as a function of cleaning cost per unit of collector aperture and cleaning interval. Results are presented for a process heat temperature of 177°C.