Many efforts have been spent in the design and development of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) Plants worldwide. Most of them are for on-grid electricity generation and they are medium or large plants (in the order of MWs) which can benefit from the economies of scale.Nevertheless, several potential applications for Small-Scale CSP plants (< 1 MW) can be relevant in the industrial sector as well as for off-grid purposes (i.e. in rural contexts).This paper presents the technologies suitable for off-grid applications, for electricity or cogenerated production. Major characteristics are illustrated and advantages and drawbacks for each configuration identified and discussed

Solar Dish Micro Gas Turbine (MGT) systems have the potential to become interesting small-scale power plants in off-grid or mini-grid contexts for electricity or poly-generation production. The main challenging component of such systems is the solar receiver which should operate at high temperatures with concentrated solar radiations, which strongly vary with time. This paper deals with the design and the analysis of a novel solar receiver integrated with a short-term storage system based on Phase Change Materials to prevent sudden variations in the maximum temperature of the MGT working fluid. Particularly, the charge and discharge behavior of the storage system was analyzed by means of Computational Fluid Dynamic methods to evaluate the potentiality of the concept and the component capabilities. Achieved results were highly satisfactory: the novel solar receiver has a good thermal inertia and can prevent relevant fluctuations in the working fluid temperature for 20–30 min.