Hybrid modeling of central receiver solar power plants

With the forecast exhaustion of fossil fuels, governments are promoting renewable power plants as a viable alternative for electricity generation. One of the disadvantages of this kind of power generation facilities is the need to have a backup fuel, because the primary renewable resource is uncontrollable and discontinuous. From a modeling point of view, a power station with more than one source of supply changes its dynamical behavior according to Boolean events, thus mixing continuous and discrete dynamics in the system. The main contribution of this work is the modeling of a renewable power plant with two energy sources using a Mixed Logical Dynamical (MLD) representation, which is a modeling tool for the representation of hybrid systems. The advantages of using this modeling approach are discussed in the paper. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.