Optimal design of an "Energy Tower" power plant

The Energy Tower (ET) is a power plant that uses seawater and solar energy accumulated in hot dry desert air to produce electricity. An optimization algorithm was designed and programmed for the design of an ET that also includes water reservoirs, pipes, and pumps. The algorithm is a variant of the block coordinate descent method, where one subproblem is formulated as a linear programming problem, and a second subproblem usually has an analytic solution. If the analytic solution is nonfeasible, a variant of the quasi-Newton algorithm is used instead. The algorithm was tested with input information from the arid area near Eilat, the Red Sea, Israel.