Analysis of the Levelized cost of Electricity (LCOE) of Solar PV Systems considering their Environmental impacts on Biodiversity

Large scale solar photo voltaic plants are being developed and implemented at rapid rates and others are being set up to occupy large tracts of land running to millions of acres across the globe. The cascaded environmental impacts of such huge installations are not well addressed in both literature and in the famous techno-economic modelling tools such as HOMER, SAM, INSEL and TRNSYS. This study provides a full cost approach for determining the Levelized cost of Electricity (LCOE). The study incorporates all the costs incurred during generation and operation including the externality costs that have been traditionally omitted by other models. This has been aided by the use of a new software called the ECOS model developed by students of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology. The study carries out sizing of Solar PV for Lodwar and the resultant metrics such as LCOE when externalities are included. The novel contribution of this paper is the incorporation of the environmental impacts of Solar PV which has not done by other software tools like HOMER.

I. Introduction

Solar Photovoltaic power is experiencing high growth having an installed capacity of 22GWp and growing at a rapid rate of about 40% annually [1]. In countries like the US the government has been forcing the utility companies that power generated must contain a certain renewable energy fraction. This has lead to wide scale land occupation and ecosystem damage. For instance, New Jersy has set a target of 22.5% renewable energy by 2021, New York has completed a 37MWp solar plant at Long Island, while Canadian Ontario has a complete solar Plant of about 80MWp [1][2].