Design of a Utility Scale Solar Farm in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Saudi Arabia plans to generate 3.45GW of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and 9.5 GW by 2023. This project addresses the lack of literature on the design and feasibility of large scale solar in Saudi Arabia. This project went through different design steps with proper justification in designing a 50 MW solar farm. Site selection was carried out using Solar GIS to find the optimum location in terms of irradiance, terrain, proximity to roads and air temperature. Then a PV module was selected from a comprehensive list of all available modules in the market by evaluating the modules based on fill factor, efficiency, degradation rate, power density and module price. PVsyst was then used to simulate the project and the results were displayed and discussed. These results include Loss analysis, energy generated analysis and temperature performance. Next, an economic analysis was carried out which showed that the payback period for this project is 6 years, 315.9% return on investment (ROI) and 164 million USD net profit by the end of the project lifetime (25 years). Lastly, CO2 balance analysis was reported which showed that over the project lifetime Saudi Arabia would be able to save more than 1.68 million tons of CO 2 emissions.