An economic analysis of rooftop solar power plant and energy auditing for commercial building in Egypt

Fossil resources of electricity are costly due to their limited availability. In Egypt, the government has launched a plan to limit electricity subsidy since 2014 till 2019. On the other hand, the government is encouraging customers to apply renewable energy solutions as infinite sources of electricity. The main purpose of this paper is energy auditing of a large commercial building which is Cairo Festival City Mall (CFCM) using LEED standards. Utilizing the unusable areas of CFCM to apply PV solar project is proposed while two scenarios are investigated. The first evaluates the profit when selling the generated energy from the PV plant to the utility through Feed in Tariff program, and the other investigates reducing the energy consumed from utility using generated energy. Huge financial benefits can be achieved as the payback period of the system is estimated by 7.7 and 12.91 years when applying first and second scenario respectively.