Techno – Economic Assessment of PV Power Plants utilizing artificial intelligence

Abstract

The energy demand has been increased as the population increased all over the world, due to this increment and the harmful effect of conventional energy sources, renewable sources have become a preferable solution. A lot of tools and parameters have been used for evaluating renewable energy projects, the current study aims to techno-economic assessment of a 1.5 MW photovoltaic (PV) power plant located in Al Dhahriya south of Hebron district. The weather, climate, and energy parameters data of two years of continuous monitoring have been achieved from the PV power plant. The techno-economic performance parameters: final yield, reference yield, capacity utilization factor, net present value, simple payback period, and the annual average monthly Performance Ratio have been calculated through related mathematical expressions, the values of final energy yields for the years 2021 and 2022, are 1902 kWh/kWp and 1867 kWh/kWp, respectively, this result can be deemed as reasonable and acceptable values. The value of simple payback period on average is 4.82 years, this indicates that the project is feasible because all project costs will be reimbursed over the first five years of its lifetime. The optimal PV power plant location has also been studied utilizing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method, the required inputs for this analysis have been obtained and entered to MATLAB software, The analysis process indicates that the optimal locations for all the proposed Distribution Generation (DG) plants for all scenarios are located in the furthest points from the main electricity feeding point in the grid, Those locations are associated with minimum real power losses in the grid as well as the most improved voltage profile. It concluded that the PSO method is an effective principle for the assessment of the studied aspects, it indicates the optimal location of the studied PV power plant within a few iterations, which makes PSO a very effective developed procedure in power system applications