A Techno-Economic Optimization and Performance Assessment of a 10 kWP Photovoltaic Grid-Connected System

Abstract

The system under consideration in this paper consists of a photovoltaic (PV) array, described as having a 10 kWp capacity, battery storage, and connection to the grid via a university grid network. It is stated that the system meets a local load of 4–5 kVA. The system is in Ethiopia, and the authors give details of the location and solar resource to provide information to assess its performance. However, the performance assessment will be specific to the details of the installation and the operational rules, including the variable nature of the load profile, charging and discharging the battery storage, and importing from and exporting to the university grid. The nearby load is mostly supplied from PV and grid sources, and hence the battery installed is found to be idle, showing that the PV together with storage battery system was not utilized in an efficient and optimized way. This in turn resulted in inefficient utilization of sources, increased dependency of the load on the grid, and hence unnecessary operational expenses. Therefore, to alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a means for techno-economic optimization and performance analysis of an existing photovoltaic grid-connected system (PVGCS) by using collected data from a plant data logger for one year (2018) with a model-based Matlab/Simulink simulation and a hybrid optimization model for electric renewables (HOMER) software. According to the simulation result, the PVGCS with 5 kWp PV array optimized system was recommended, which provides a net present cost (NPC) of 5770 (€/kWh), and a cost of energy (COE) of 0.087 (€/kWh) compared to an existing 10 kWp PV system, which results in a NPC value of 6047 (€/kWh) and COE of 0.098 (€/kWh). Therefore, the resulting 5 kWp PV system connected with a storage battery was found to be more efficient and techno-economically viable as compared to the existing 10 kWp PVGCS plant.