Agenda

• Techniques: Increased efficiency reduces costs - understand the techniques that can be used to increase plant output and how to calculate their real value in cost savings
• Components: Get a detailed analysis of which CSP components integrate most effectively for each CSP technology - Parabolic Trough, Power Tower, Fresnel and Dish Stirling
• Testing: Accurate testing is essential to maintain your systems long term effectiveness - discover why and how to use benchmark testing, development testing and acceptance testing to extend your plant's life cycle

• Understand how efficiency, availability and capacity relates to your PPA conditions and how to meet specific requirements
• Master time of day delivery, thermal storage assessment, combined cycles and hybridization
• Get a utilities perspective of the quick wins and long term benefits from optimizing the value of your plant, and understand how lowering your Balance of Plant costs and your LCOE will ensure CSP’s competitiveness

• Discover how partnering with an experienced EPC can improve your plant's efficiencies through the implementation of proven Balance of Plant strategies and techniques
• Prioritizing for the short or long term - understand the different considerations of short term and long term plant operation models and discover what choices you have to weigh up that will affect your plant's operational efficiency

• Macro management for micro engineering – get the very latest in understanding heat exchangers, piping, operations, fabrication and much more in order to consolidate your overall Balance of Plant strategy
• Get lessons in how to manage not just your equipment but your overall risk and ensure that you get the highest possible value of power as a result
• Understand how working with a company benefitting from US and Spanish experience when building your plant ensures that your project is effectively more bankable from the start

Eric Svendsen, CEO, Foster Wheeler Energia, S.L.U.

• Gain a thorough understanding of the various current and historic modeling approaches used in the CSP industry
• Take a look at how the differences between the model and actual plant performance can be reconciled by taking into consideration factors such as how the output of the solar field affects the steam generator
• Understand how to compare thermal losses in field piping with the actual energy that reaches the heat exchangers, and get real life tips on how to isolate potential problems and what you can expect

• Find out how to assess location choice through looking at solar resources, water supply and other geographic factors, and how to incorporate these factors into the design of your plant to maximize yield
• Optimum electrical system layout and orientation - discover how to make the right decisions for substration, topography and health and safety issues the first time round and avoid costly mistakes

• Take an in-depth look into how to maximize your return on investment through optimized engineering
• Hear how to configure and size the different plant systems and components to take into consideration all the project features: PPA pricing scheme (flat and TOD’s), site insolation, meteorology and more
• Plant layout best practices: hear experienced developers and EPCs discuss lessons learned from building CSP and other power plants and discuss what practices have seen enough constant success that they should be used as standard in all future plant layouts
• Understand how solar filed, HTF system optimization, thermal storage and steam turbine cycle optimization affect overall yield and what you can do to ensure each of these elements work together for optimal plant performance

• Get an expert guide on how to engineer your power block so that key components like heat exchangers and turbines work together for maximum efficiency
• Everything you need to know about cooling liquids - including life span, pressures and how to maintain them to keep your power block cool for minimal cost
• How to handle hot oil - understand how to install and use pumps, expansion vessels and ullage systems

• Gain a thorough assessment of steam generator components - superheater, reheater, economizers and more!
• Hear valuable lessons and practical tips direct from those innovating with Solar Steam Generators in the field

• Fossil fuel power plant turbines are designed for superheated steam - discover why this isn't ideal for your CSP project and what turbine design refinements are necessary in order to improve your plants output
• Discover how turbine design relates to the heat and mass balance of your entire system and what you can do to ensure you don't make any costly mistakes
• As modern turbines push up to the 150MW benchmark, how will upscaling effect turbine design?
• Tough turbines for tough times - discover how you can reheat after dealing with long term shutdown due to weather or other conditions and which turbine designs are robust enough to handle this challenge

• Dry cooling - find out what the water availability requirements are in order for wet cooling to even be an option for your plant, and what to do when it isn't
• Balancing today's cost against tomorrow's efficiency - does dry cooling trump wet cooling because of it's lower investment cost and environmental benefits?
• Hear how hybrid systems may offer the best of both world by using an air cool condenser for 90% of the cooling capacity and 10% regular - discover how this reduces water usage but has a significant impact on cost

• Understand how the size of the air cooled condenser impacts steam turbine efficiency, particular for desert sites, and what you can do to work around this
• Hear an honest assessment of the benefits and risks of water treatment and find out how it affects your overall project development costs. As water quality decreases, water treatment costs will increase – is there any way to overcome this equation?
• Understanding zero liquid discharge: how to plan ahead for waste water treatment and sludge issues - address unnecessary costs and environmental concerns before they ever happen

• Hear from SRNL on the significant gains in HTF research and understand the impact on your project’s value proposition
• Dramatic improvements in Heat Transfer Fluids (HTFs) – are the promises of 10-40% efficiency enhancements through nano-particle enhanced HTFs realistic?

Join in a unique, informal focus group that discusses in detail the influence and importance of key components on your overall plant efficiency, including: reflectors, frames, valves, pylons, drive motors, heat exchangers, receiver tubes, ball joints and more!

• Take a look at how best to use trackers and process control and develop surefire strategies to deal with fast and slow moving clouds and other environmental variables
• Understand the challenges of controlling a direct steam generation system and get real strategies for delivering at the target process conditions

• Hear how early planning for operations and maintenance will ensure your plant’s output is consistent and reliable
• Should you build your plant to be as robust as it can be? Discuss whether avoiding the risk of failure is worth the upfront capital costs of a fully robust facility
• See the numbers on the impact of output downtime and how it plays into the balancing of overall cost against efficiency/availability/capacity

• Matching maintenance to the needs of your plant's location - find out how best to evaluate plant repairs and improvements and how to discover the ideal regular maintenance schedule and budget according to your site's placement
• Monitoring for efficiency losses and planning plant repairs – how to find the right balance between cost of repair and efficiency losses for maximum electricity output
• Something will go wrong at some point - get a handle on the best way to cope with power failures and how best to identify quickly what's gone wrong and how to fix it in order to maintain investor confidence in your project

• Performance acceptance – understand how to get each component guaranteed at a certain level and find out how best to properly manage the interfaces in between components
• Hear about NREL and Kearney & Associates Performance Acceptance Tests for Parabolic Trough systems and understand what this means for the CSP industry

• Get an overview of performance testing in CSP and understand the advances by ASME to encompass performance testing throughout current projects

• Should you choose to go with a Combined Cycle plant? Find out under what circumstances combined cycles are appropriate and how you can get the best output at the lowest cost
• Understand the full effect integrating combined cycles with hybridization can have on overall plant efficiency
• Combined Cycle efficiency gains - see the numbers on the gains that combined cycle technology has achieved, discover their full potential and understand what conditions are conducive for integrating CC plants with CSP

• Storage media considerations - uncover the impact storage media has on the output of your plant and how this can impact downtime and plant optimization
• Hear best practice tips for getting the most out of your storage capabilities and get a step by step guide to hooking up an efficient connection between your storage and the power block
• Learn about the cost of storage media in dollars per kilogram, how you can build thermal storage into your project effectively and what can be done to reduce costs while boosting efficiency