Economic Study of Solar Energy Systems

Global installed capacity of renewable energy technologies is growing rapidly. Hence, the technology assessment of energy production technologies is often computed as financial cost. Competition among alternative renewable technologies has increased substantially over the past few years, due to downward cost trends within each technology that have resulted from policy support and financial incentives. This chapter presents the results of the relationship between the energy price generated by the CTR plant with changing the number of storage hours (Ts), solar multiple, and also with the changing capacity of the station. Also, this chapter introduces program for optimal cost and LCOE of CTR system, PV and CTR/PV hybrid solar system. The computer program has been designed to determine optimum design parameters of PV and CTR for the system under study. The decision from the computer program is based on minimum price of the generated kWh from the system. Finally, the objective of this chapter is to research whether or not a solar PV system is more economical compared to the CTR system. The systems being considered in this study are in Aswan, Egypt as this region has hot and clear weather.