Publications Details
Reliability of the Solar One plant during the power production phase
Solar One is the world's largest central receiver power plant. During the last 4 years the plant availability was 80%, 83%, and 96%, respectively, during hours of sunshine. This reliability is considered to be excellent considering the plant is a first-of-a-kind facility and because it has been subjected to daily cyclic service. In this paper we present the frequencies and causes of the plant outages that occurred. The ten most important causes comprised 72% of the total outage time. Qualitative insights related to the cause and mitigation of these ten are provided. The information presented in this paper will be useful to studies aimed at improving the reliability of future solar central receiver power plants. It is also useful to members of the utility industry who are considering investing in this technology or are considering cyclic operation of conventional power plants. 4 refs., 3 figs.