EVALUATING ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS ON COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS AND GRID CONNECTION REQUIREMENTS

Abstract

This thesis is divided into two parts. The first one has tried to enhance the energy production in Cairo Festival City Mall (CFCM) by utilizing the unusable areas and installing a Photovoltaic (PV) plant on rooftop to reduce the energy consumed from utility grid that will lessen fossil fuels consumption and thus improve the environmental issues. In addition, LEED (Leadership of Engineering and Environmental Design) standards have been applied to evaluate this large commercial building and to check its status and how many points it will achieve when utilizing PV generation on site. Besides, the gained profit when selling the generated energy from the PV plant to the utility grid through Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) program is also evaluated. On the other hand, the second part discusses the grid connection parameters of a PV power plant. A case study of 5 MW PV plant in Sharm El-Sheikh has been studied to check its compatibility with the grid parameters for a successful interconnection or not, and the environmental impacts have been discussed and compared with the traditional resources as well. A comparison of the electrical energy output of different simulation programs available nowadays for PV systems such as; PVSyst, and SAM design and the actual energy output from an existing PV plant with the same characteristics have also been carried out.