Guidelines for Reporting Parabolic Trough Solar Electric System Performance

The purpose of this activity is to develop a generic methodology which can be used to track and compare the performance of parabolic trough power plants. The approach needs to be general enough to work for all existing and future parabolic trough plant designs, provide meaningful comparisons of year to year performance, and allow for comparisons between dissimilar plant designs. The approachpresented here builds on the earlier work for trough and dish systems, and uses the net annual system efficiency as the primary metric for evaluating the performance of parabolic trough power plants. However, given the complex nature of large parabolic trough plants, the net annual system efficiency by itself does not adequately characterize the performance of the plant. The approach taken hereis to define a number of additional performance metrics which enable a more comprehensive understanding of overall plant performance.