Design of solar power plant for the Eagle Ford Shale patch at Cotulla, Texas|

Energy is the basic requirement of human beings. Due to high energy requirement of the human population and conventional sources of energy are depleting, researchers and scientists are now concentrating on the renewable sources. Solar energy being the most sought after source of energy as it is very abundant and ecofriendly. The starting cost to exploit solar energy with the power plants is reasonably high. So to make the use of solar energy more feasible, it is required to reduce the starting cost and increase it efficiency and profitability. The starting cost could be reduced by optimizing the components of the solar power plant. The main tasks of this research are to optimize the solar parameters and components and henceforth suggest an optimized design of the solar power plant so that the solar power can be used more efficiently. A mathematical model was created to find the optimum value of different design parameters and components of the power plant. A non-linear programming approach was used for the mathematical modeling and the MS Excel Solver was used for the calculations of the various unknown design parameters and an optimized result for these parameters was generated