Bankability of Concentrated Solar Power in India: A Plant-Configuration Case Study in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai

This study evaluates options for deployment configurations of current CSP technologies that may decrease the LCOE or exploit other attributes of the technology that could make it a more attractive investment in India (e.g., shift the time of availability).

The research addresses the following questions:

1. How do different combinations of hybridization and thermal storage (referred to herein as system configurations) impact the LCOE of CSP power plants? How do these configurations impact IRR and total electricity delivered to the grid?

2. Does the bankability of different configurations for CSP depend on geographic location and the attendant solar resource? How do cost and system configuration trade off with other attributes, such as dispatchability and time-of-day of availability?

3. What policy insights can we gain from such a configuration analysis?

*Zhimin Mao, Oluwatobi Oluwatola, and Aimee Curtright are other authors of this paper.