Feasibility Study of a Hybrid CSP-CPV Power Plant in Saint Martin’s Island, Bangladesh

Saint Martin’s Island of Bangladesh, located remotely in the Bay of Bengal, is isolated from the national grid system. Due to its geographical location, solar power is available throughout the year in the island. Consequently, solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is currently being used for generation of electricity while battery energy storage system (BESS) is being used as a power backup. However, the BESS involves high installation and operational costs, and its lifespan is also relatively short. One way to address this issue is to utilize the thermal energy storage (TES) of concentrated solar power (CSP) technology along with concentrated solar photovoltaic (CPV) system. In this context, the feasibility of a hybrid CSP-CPV based power plant assisted by linear Fresnel reflector technology is investigated in this paper. A novel dataset of load demand is collected from the consumer end by conducting a survey. Moreover, the matching of generation with the instantaneous load demand is assessed by changing the direction of the linear Fresnel reflector mirrors. Different combinations of CPV, CSP and BESS are investigated in the study by varying their ratio. The findings show that the installation cost reduces as more of the BESS is replaced by the CSP technology. The cost is found to be minimum for the combination of 31.5% CPV and 68.5% CSP. Furthermore, the cost-effective appropriate combination also satisfies the load demand in every possible scenario. As such, with the free rotation of the reflector faces, the CSP-CPV based hybrid power plant can offer cheaper electricity to the consumers while ensuring sensitivity to load variability.