Economic and environmental assessments of solar home systems consisting different lighting sources

Abstract

In Bangladesh, 55% of the population are getting electricity from the national grid. Mostly diesel generators supply the electricity to the off-grid regions. Use of diesel leads to increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which is a big environmental concern all over the world. Solar Home Systems (SHSs) offer promising solution to the areas that are not connected to the grid. More than 3.6 million SHSs are installed in remote locations across the country. Most SHSs in Bangladesh use small tube lights as the lighting source. However, the recent SHSs make use of LED bulbs instead of the tube lights in order to decrease the PV panel size which would lower the initial capital cost and annualized cost. In this study, two different Solar Home Systems were analysed having tube lights and LED bulbs as the lighting source, respectively. Each of the SHSs consists of 6 lights (Tube light/LED bulb) and 2 fans with operating hours of 4 daily. The analysis shows that the SHS with tube lights requires initial capital cost of $432, which is 48% higher than the system having LED bulbs as the lighting source. As the SHSs do not use any fossil fuel, there is no operational GHG emission. However, a large amount of energy is used to manufacture PV panels, which needs to be quantified to understand the environmental impact. Energy consumption to manufacture the solar panels of Solar Home System with LED bulbs is 1.44 MWht which is 25% lower than the SHS with tube lights.