Towards Sustainable Power Generation Using Solar Chimney

According to the strategic re-urbanization of the Egyptian population from the densely populated areas, numerous new settlements with residential housing areas will be set up in the countryside in the near future. The scheduled areas are mainly situated in hot arid areas. The use of the high temperature air in these areas in electricity generation for the residential houses is quite important, since the success of the re-urbanization project depends mainly on providing urban buildings with a suitable level of infrastructure and facilities. Solar chimney power plant (SCPP) is one of the promising power generation facilities that use solar energy for electricity production. It is a solar thermal power plant that utilizes a combination of solar air collector and central updraft tube to generate a solar induced convective flow which drives pressure staged turbines to generate electricity. In this paper, a description of the functional principle of the SCPP components is presented and some results from designing a medium scale unit using simple mathematical model are given.