TECHNOECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF SOLAR NET METERING IN ISLAMABAD CONSIDERING THE POLICY FACTORS

Abstract

Historically, there has been a tremendous increase in renewable energy resource research due to ambitious aspirations of supplying clean, inexpensive energy; nonetheless, an estimated 771 million people in developing nations lack access to electricity. Pakistan's total solar irradiation is around 5.5 x 1014 kWh per year, with an average of 10 hours of sunlight per day. Studies also suggest that Pakistan has the potential to produce solar power of 2.9 million MW in total. Gridconnected PV system allows the consumer to produce electrical energy as needed and transmit excess electrical energy to grid stations via a bidirectional billing mechanism. The goal of this research study is to motivate photovoltaic system utilization through roof-top grid connected PV systems to achieve maximum power and reduced cost on billing. A survey questionnaire was designed to collect electricity demand of residents from Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The average hourly demand for different seasons of the year were clustered using K-means clustering. System Advisor Model (SAM) software was used to simulate an optimum grid connected PV system. The optimization criteria selected for each cluster and all the debt-to-equity scenarios was Internal Rate of Return (IRR). The optimum system is the one that achieves the highest IRR for the highest PV system for each cluster under each debt scenario. Therefore, 4.405 KW for Cluster 1, 8.205 KW for Cluster 2 and 6.154 KW for Cluster 3. The average electricity bill was reduced to almost 93.32% over the project lifespan for Cluster 1, 85.32% for Cluster 2 and 89.01% for Cluster 3.