reliability evaluation of solar power plants equipped with parabolic trough reflectors

Due to the challenges of fossil fuels, renewable resources such as wind, solar and ocean are applied for electric power production. among different kinds of renewable resources, the potential of solar energy is significant in iran. the electricity cost produced by parabolic trough collectors is low. accordingly, this paper aims to study the reliability performance of this plant. to this end, a multi-state reliability model considering both failures of composed components and variation of produced power caused by variation of sun irradiance is developed for solar power plants with parabolic trough collectors. to reduce the number of power states of the model, the fuzzy c-means clustering method and xb index are applied. the obtained reliability model of solar plants is utilized for analytical reliability analysis of electric networks. numerical outcomes of adequacy analysis of rbts and ieee-rts results integration of parabolic trough collectors improve reliability indices of the system. however, due to the variation of sun irradiance results in the variation of plant output, improvement of reliability indices caused by parabolic trough collector is less than traditional plants. besides, by comparing the outcomes obtained by the proposed work and monte carlo method, the accuracy of the suggested method is approved.