Techno-economic analysis of an off-grid photovoltaic natural gas power system for a university

Abstract

The objective of this study is to determine the technical and economical feasibility of a PV-natural gas hybrid power system to supply electricity and energy for a university in Malaysia. The yearly average daily solar radiation received at the university campus area is about 4.77 kWh/m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and this provides for the implementation of a hybrid PV power system. Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables (HOMER) software was used to size, simulate and evaluate the hybrid power system in this analysis. The simulations provide some insights into the monthly electricity generated by the photovoltaic-natural gas system, net present cost (NPC) and cost of energy (COE) of the system, renewable fraction (RF) and greenhouse gas emissions of the system. The simulation in HOMER was performed for a 2MW PV generator together with 8.4 MW gas generator. From the simulation results, it is found that for a hybrid system with RF of 9%, the NPC of the hybrid system is US$ 123,231,728 and the COE is $0.272 which is much lower than what it would cost for a gas only system (RF is 0%). With the inclusion of PV, the amount of natural gas burned in the hybrid system was reduced and this in turn reduced the amount of environmentally polluting gases emitted into the atmosphere by 7.2% as compared to a gas only system. This analysis suggests that a PV hybrid power system should be implemented as it a cleaner and more economical method of power generation.