The Final Report to the Cyprus Government was submitted in June 2010. An Overview of the CSP-DSW study can be found here. The full report is available upon request.

Proposed Design

The conceptual design of the co-generation Plant has received considerable attention by the CSP-DSW research team. This design is optimized for Cyprus but also suitable for other islands and isolated coastal regions in the Mediterranean region. It can also be particularly useful in isolated island or coastal communities in need of electricity and high-quality potable water in the developing world.

The proposed design of this plant is based on constraints that have influenced the technological choices, performance parameters and operating schemes. It comprises of the following components:

• Solar energy will be harvested by a field of Heliostats on a hilly, south facing, location near the sea.
• The solar energy will be captured by a central receiver and converted to heat and stored in a salt container of novel design at high temperatures.
• Steam will be generated from the heat reservoir of the salt container or from an alternative thermal storage concept.
• Electricity will be produced using commercially available Steam extraction turbine.
• Desalinated water will be produced using an innovative Multiple Effect Distillation (MED) with a Thermal Vapour Compressor, from the heat output of the steam turbine and other heat sources of the system.  

Main Findings and Conclusions

I.    The concept of co-generation of electricity and Desalinated Sea Water using Concentrated Solar Power is sound both from an engineering point of view and from an economic and policy point of view.
II.    Given the currently available turbine technology a minimum size of 4MWe is required. A capital investment approaching 25 Million Euros (excluding the cost of land) will be needed.
III.    A detailed and sophisticated business model of the pilot plant whose conceptual design we have studied in detail reveals that such a plant, with the above mentioned parameters will be economically profitable.
IV.    An investigation of the commercially available components reveals that key components (such as heliostats) are not optimized for the particular application and for deployment in Cyprus; components that are available have not been designed or tested for conditions of saline humid coastal environment. This will introduce unnecessarily high risk of rapid aging and imparting unacceptable financial risk. In situ testing of components should immediately begin to correct this technological risk.
V.    A number of “custom” solutions that need to be engineered for the particular application, such as the receiver and storage units, which are currently at the experimental stage need to be further tested, preferably in the Cyprus coastal environment, to a sufficient degree to achieve a well-integrated CSP-DSW design and to present acceptable risk for an investment to a pilot plant.