Techno-economic assessment of Solar Photovoltaic Plants

With the advent of increase in renewable energy penetrations the applications of renewable energy technologies have increased. Solar energy being abundantly available is used as one of the popular renewable energy technologies. Prior understanding of the performance of solar power plant results in proper economical decisions and technical improvement in photovoltaic technology. In this paper, a comparison of performance indicators of different Solar PV plant configurations such as 2 MWp ,4 MWp ,6 MWp are carried out and reported. In addition, the effect of varying discount rate and fixed inflation rate is analyzed on the variation of performance indicators such as Performance Ratio, Return on Investment, Net Present Value and Levelized Cost of Electricity. From the results, it is observed that with the increase in discount rate from 5% to 15% the Net Present Value decreases by 59.371% for 2MWp, 64.800% for 4 MWp and 60.902% for 6MWp. LCOE increases by 29.054 % for 2 MWp, 27.400 % for 4MWp and 23.951 % for 6MWp. ROI decreases by 59.372% for 2MWp, 64.827 for 4MWp, and 60.877 % for 6 MWp respectively.