Levelized Cost of Energy Calculations for Microgrid-Integrated Solar-Storage Technology

Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) enables financial comparisons between different generation technologies with different scales of operation, investment, cost structures, operating time periods, and lifetimes. It serves as a viable metric in comparing the growing sources of energy, such as high-capital renewables, with traditional sources including fossil-fuel based technologies that have different fixed-to-variable-costs ratios and low capital costs. What is yet to be investigated is the LCOE for a combination of technologies that work in a coordinated fashion. In this paper, the LCOE calculation of a microgrid-integrated solar-storage technology is discussed. A set of sensitivity analyses for a microgrid model are further evaluated to show the impacts of various factors in the economic viability of this combination.