Opportunities for Economic Efficiency Increase in Renewable Energy Powered Off-Grid Systems

In stand-alone renewable energy projects for remote communities, very approximate approaches to cost estimation are widely used. For example, logistics is estimated as a percentage of capital expenditures, similarly to inhabited areas. While for remote areas both the rate per kilometer and the distance in logistics are much bigger. The same applies to the assessment of construction and maintenance costs. The lack of data on renewable energy resources can lead to errors in the estimation of energy production in the first tens of percent, while capital and operating costs are often underestimated by multifold. Together with the frequent significant reassessment of energy input to the real energy system, this leads to the fact that projects do not achieve the planned economic indicators. In this paper, we compare the results of the feasibility study of the Verkhoyansk solar-diesel hybrid power plant obtained using a methodology for calculating an economically reasonable tariff and more advanced methods that take into account the specifics of the use of intermittent renewable energy. As a result, a significant difference is shown in both the optimal configurations of the power plant and levelized cost of electricity.