Abstract

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), in conjunction with Photovoltaic (PV) technology, allows providing clean, economic and reliable power supply to operational mining industry by means of optimal hybrid designs. This allows leveraging photovoltaic's (PV) ultra-low Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) during solar hours with economic and highly flexible CSP technology to cover for intra-day Plane Of Array irradiation (POA) variability, daily ramping of the PV solar field and night hours supply of power. The present work provides a simulation programming based approach to estimate the cost effectiveness of a greenfield co-located hybrid CSP-PV system to supply a real mining operation electric demand profile using real meteorological data and up to date national cost structures.