Developing a cleaning strategy for hybrid solar plants PV/CSP: Case study for semi-arid climate

Highlights: • Soiling assessment for linear Fresnel collector and PV systems in semi-arid climate. • The soiling effect is more than 10 times important for CSP in comparison to PV technology. • The cleaning cost is 0.05 $/m²/month and 0.1 $/m²/month respectively for the PV and CSP systems with manually cleaning. • For the CSP system, the cleaning costs could be reduced by 13% using a cleaning robot system. Nowadays, hybrid solar plant with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Photovoltaic systems (PV) is the optimal installation for solar energy conversion. However, a cleaning strategy should be performed with an optimized schedule in order to avoid energy loss as well as to minimize the cleaning and the O&M costs. In this paper, for the first time, investigations on the difference between the cleaning strategy for both a CSP power plant and a PV system installed at the same climate conditions in the mid-south of Morocco were carried out. The most convenient cleaning scenario was identified through the analysis of the cleaning costs and the energy losses, by taking into account different parameters of the site specifications. The results show that in the case of CSP system, a single cleaning per week is found to be the most profitable in comparison to cleaning twice per week (gain of 15 $/month) with manual cleaning. However, the cleaning costs could be decreased by 13% using a cleaning robot. In the case of PV system, the monthly cleaning scenario will return better profits than no cleaning, and will be more efficient in comparison to frequently cleaning daily, weekly, and fortnightly in terms of the abrasion impact on the surface of the PV modules.