Economic and environmental investigation of renewable energy sources for micro-grids coastal areas

Abstract EN

The standalone power generating units in Marsa-Alam coastal areas depend on fossil fuel to feed electrical loads.

this causes many side effects like green gas emissions and high fuel costs, which leads to weak economic growth in this region.

while the global interest increases to utilize renewable resources due to several benefits and renewable technologies in solar energy and wind turbine.

the objective of this article is to design a tecno-economic and feasibility study of using hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES) over the conventional resources.

eight different types of models including solar photovoltaic (SPVs) / wind turbines (WTs) / power converter / diesel / battery are designed using HOMER software.

the key factors are used to make the decision such as net present cost (NPC), net levelized costs of energy (LCOEs), the renewable fraction (RF), load demand, availability of the HRES and greenhouse gases emissions.

the lifetime and capacity of WTs, SPVs, converter, and battery, nominal discount rate, are used to decide the best optimal solution of HRES.

these analyses compared the performance of the micro-grid and showed that the optimal micro-grid is techno-economically feasible based on LCOEs.

the LCOEs and net present cost (NPC) of optimum source ($0.224 / kWh and $103M) are the least compared to the other hybrid source configurations.