Power from photovoltaic installed in the middle of the Lebanese high-ways: PV system in the middle of the high-ways

Abstract

It is well-known that the bottleneck of Photovoltaic (PV) systems is the use of storage batteries and the area needed to install the system. The main idea in this work is to design a large PV system with almost zero cost of land needed for the installation, and without the need of batteries. The proposed PV system makes use of special areas of the Lebanese lands; the middle of high-ways which are usually left unoccupied without being exploited by any other business. This way, the traditional high cost of PV systems residing in the land and storage is eliminated. The fact that we do not need batteries in the proposed PV system results from the ability to connect the output power directly to the public utility grid. The design consists of 20,476 PV panels that cover the middle of the high-way extending from Tyre to Saida, with a distance of 27,300 meters and 2 meters wide. The resulting PV system has a capacity of 6.2 MW, and the total initial cost is ∼8.845 M$, however, after 25 years (which is the proposed lifetime of the PV system) the project would generate a total of ∼54.7 M$. Moreover, the PV system would provide net reduction of CO2 and GHG emissions of ∼7,388 tCO2/year.