Adopting Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) for Harnessing Green Economy in Ethiopia: A Study on the Design, Modeling and Economic Analysis of Grid-Tied BIPV
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Date
2015-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Contrary to add-on Photovoltaics (PV), Building-integrated PV (BIPV) refers to the application of PV arrays where they are integral parts of the building envelope having the function of producing electricity as well. Ethiopia, as a country having average daily solar radiation of 5.2kWh/m2, can make use of this technology as a means of achieving the country’s goal of expanding electric power generation and green growth strategy. In addition, by producing power close to the point of use, the technology shall contribute to the reduction of the current 23% transmission and distribution losses encountered in the power system of the country. To this end, the opportunities of meeting some of the country’s electricity demand by introducing grid-tied BIPV in commercial and residential buildings of urban Ethiopia were investigated by taking the new Zemen Bank Headquarter 30-storey Building as a case study. A detailed design, simulation and economic analysis of a grid-tied BIPV system were conducted for four different scenarios of the building using PVsyst software. The results of the simulation showed that with an optimal design a significant amount of energy, 897,000kWh/year, which covers 69.54% of the estimated demand of the building can be generated. This can save up to 26,910USD per year based on the current electricity tariff of Ethiopia. The simulations of the four scenarios revealed that best results can be achieved by considering the system starting from the initial architectural design of the building rather than retrofitting an existing one. On the other hand, the economic evaluation resulted in an energy cost of US$0.11/kWh for the optimal design which is much higher than the prevailing electricity retail price of Ethiopia, US$0.03/kWh. From this it was concluded that grid-parity shall be achieved in the long run since the costs of PV modules is dropping while their efficiency is rising.
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Keywords
Building-integrate, Commercial and residential