Abstract Solar chimney power plant (SCPP) is one of the promising power generation approaches for future applications of solar energy. An unsteady comprehensive mechanism model and a streamlined unsteady mechanism model of SCPPs are derived to analyze the energy conversion and transmission of the system in this paper. The streamlined unsteady mechanism model with concise expressions clearly indicates the correlations among the power output and geometric parameters. Both of the two models are verified by the experimental data from the Spain Manzanares demonstration plant. Moreover, a power quality factor is defined to evaluate the power generation quality of SCPPs both from the points of generation efficiency and power stability. The suitability of the geometric optimization of SCPPs based on the streamlined unsteady mechanism model is finally verified by an example. The coupling optimization results show that there are a strong positive correlation between the chimney height and the power quality factor, as well as a negative correlation between the solar collector radius and the power quality factor. Furthermore, the optimal solar collector height is a quadratic function relation with the chimney diameter, while the optimal thickness of the heat storage layer is little associated with other geometric parameters.