SUN-DT: Smart Use of Novel Digital Tools for advanced performance and reduced costs in CSP tower plants

Concentrated solar power (CSP) tower plants can deliver clean, dispatchable energy, but competitiveness remains limited by high capital costs and operational complexity leading to high O&M expenses and limited efficiency. While capital costs may fall through economies of scale, O&M costs can be drastically reduced using digital technologies and artificial intelligence to enhance monitoring, control, and predictive maintenance. These innovations improve performance and reliability throughout the plant’s lifetime. Without digital transformation, CSP risks being overtaken by cheaper renewables, constraining Europe’s energy diversification.

The EU-funded SUN-DT project will create an integrated digital platform combining automated heliostat calibration and characterization, a solar-field and receiver digital twin, predictive maintenance, and advanced energy management to boost CSP efficiency, reliability, and competitiveness in Europe’s clean energy transition.

In this project, CENER plays a central role as project coordinator and co-developer of several digital tools critical to the SUN-DT concept. Our contributions include technical assistance, modeling, simulation, optimization, and evaluation across multiple work packages. Specifically, HELIOSTATACC (WP3) for heliostat characterization and calibration, SUN-DTWIN (WP4), the digital twin for the solar field and receiver, and D-OPT (WP5), a dispatch optimization tool, ensuring these technologies advance the maturity and performance of the SUN-DT system.