The WASCOP project aims at demonstrating from the functional prototypes currently designed that solutions for the reduction of the water use in CSP plant can be achieved.
On the cooling operation side, from the modelling activities already done, a preliminary assessment of the interest of the technologies has been achieved. Technologies are delayed heat exhaust through different kind of heat storage methods, hybridized wet/dry cooler and an innovative versatile cooler (air cooler with additional water spray avoiding full evaporation system). For each of those technologies, functional prototype will be realized during the second period of the project and then assessed in relevant environment. Numerical models will then be fitted to be able to predict the water (and energy) saved from each technology with the associated economic parameters, and this for any kind of plant location and configuration. Expected impacts are both the reduction down to 10 % of the water traditionally consumed by power block cooling operation, but also the increase of the dry cooled plant performances under high temperature environments.
On the cleaning operation side, different kind of lab prototypes of soiling sensors have shown promising results achieving respectively accurate soiling information levels. This information, coupled with the preparation of the soiling and dew model to be developed will help plant owners to schedule in a more convenient way the cleaning cycle operations and so save water while avoiding unrelevant ones. In addition, dust prevention technologies comprising both dust barriers for the solar fields, anti-soiling coatings for absorber glasses and reflectors have also, from preliminary lab experiments, shown interesting effects that must be confirmed on out door or simulated operational conditions. Water cleaning operation for CSP plants integrating those technologies are expected to be 2 time less frequent than without, saving human resource besides water. In addition, as the preliminary tests seems to confirm it, novel cleaning method using US effect will achieve a very good recover of the mirror reflectance with hardly any water (less than 10% of the water normally used for cleaning operations).
Finally, the toolbox encompassing model, will provide, from each technology development, a global assessment of the total gain expected for specific location and configuration, leading to optimization of CSP plant operation and maintenance.
Besides the technological and economic impacts of water savings on CSP stakeholders, the project expects to demonstrate that CSP can be beneficial to local communities, taking care of the water resource preservation while supporting sustainable local wealth creation.
