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Bashar - Aldbaiat - H00331865 - B51GF - Final - Report AREE
Bashar - Aldbaiat - H00331865 - B51GF - Final - Report AREE
Bashar - Aldbaiat - H00331865 - B51GF - Final - Report AREE
Contents
1. Abstract: ............................................................................................................. 2
2. Site and solar irradiance data: .......................................................................... 2
3. Demand data...................................................................................................... 4
3.1 Demand in terms of electricity consumption. ................................................ 4
4. PV system Initial design: .................................................................................. 5
5. System optimization: ......................................................................................... 7
5.1 Buffer Tank w/o Batteries............................................................................... 7
5.1.A) Maximum volume of water was stored during weekend: ...................... 7
5.1.B) Minimum volume of water was stored during weekend. ...................... 8
5.2 Batteries w/o Buffer Tank............................................................................... 9
5.3 Batteries & Buffer Tank. .................................................................................... 10
5.4 System optimization conclusions and final design: ..................................... 13
6. System Losses: ................................................................................................. 14
7. Economic Evaluation: ...................................................................................... 15
7.1 Potential Revenue in the future: .................................................................. 16
8. Overcoming Constrains: .................................................................................. 16
9. Environmental Evaluation: ............................................................................. 17
9.1 Levelized cost of carbon abatement (LCCA): ............................................ 18
10. Conclusion: .................................................................................................... 19
11. References ..................................................................................................... 19
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1. Abstract:
Dental clinics at USTF university provide dental treatments for more than 50
patients every day from 8 am to 8 pm. Water quality is a big concern here, MOH
(the ministry of health) requires maintaining high standards. In this regard a
reversed osmosis unit had been installed in conjunction with a softener and a UV
light filter to achieve best results, the aim of this project is to run this water
purification setup through PV system and storage in order to take the system off
the grid, in which way the carbon footprint of USTF building will be mitigated,
project ambition is not at any level built around financial saving or profitability,
dental treatment services offered through dentistry clinics are totally free of
charge moreover, local grid’s electricity tariff is relatively low, however the project
has the potential to become profitable in the future, this could be obtained once
FEWA (Federal Electricity and Water Authority) open the door for net metering
and adding possibility of utilizing our PV system in power quality enhancement
services such as reactive power compensation. Designing an environmental
oriented project should take in consideration the current non-profit envelope of
this project alongside the environmental enhancement target with every step
being made throughout the process. PVSYST will be utilized as the system design
tool and financial evaluation calculator, environmental evaluation will follow the
calculations of LCOE and it will include the calculation of levelized cost of carbon
abatement LCCA as an improved and recent method to assess the feasibility of
such investment.
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Considering the small scale of our water purification station and the potential
solar energy per square meters on the site of installation, the needed space for
such installation shall not exceed the pre-reserved roof area which is about 25
square meters. The site itself does not suffer from any major obstacles in terms of
solar generation and the building’s roof is suitable for P.V installation with no
external shading due to surrounding buildings as depicted in figure (3), the only
major challenge would be dealing with the continuous accumulated dust over
modules surfaces which will require periodic cleaning.
Dentistry
College
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3. Demand data
USTF host several dental clinics which are dedicated for educational purposes,
fourth and fifth year dentistry college students receive patients as part of their
study requirements, water quality used in dental treatments should have similar
standards to potable water for obvious reasons, the rate of water flow required to
run dental clinics varies based on the number of patients or dental units occupied
at the time, a regular load profile indicate a slow growth in the number of
admissions throughout the day while max load profile which will be considered as
the reference profile assumes a constant flow rate of 60 gal/hr for 13 hours as
depicted below in figure (4):
Table 1
The total power required to run the water purification station is 1.1 kW and
hence the estimated daily Energy would be:
1.1*13= 14.3 kWh /day as shown below in figure 3.
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780
Gal
Water [gal]
Figure 5 (daily scale of demand in terms of water needs and electricity consumption)
It should be noticed that the above demand profile represents demand’s worst-
case scenario, and it will be used as the reference profile of our demand.
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1.1 kW water
plant Municipal
Water
Single Phase
MPPT INVERTER
(controller) A.C Processed
Electricity Water
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5. System optimization:
The specifications of the RO unit & its associated filters are not subject to change as they
represent an actual installed plant, other fixed design parameters are the PV module selected
earlier, the quantity of PV panels due to space constrains. With every other system component
had been fixed but the storage one, we can make a reasonable comparison between different
storage options as the only variable, different storage options might have advantages over the
initial one proposed in the initial design, we will discuss and compare those storage options
and will analyse the feasibility and the practicality of each setup, the first proposal will be: a
buffer tank as a standalone storage, no associated electrical storage will be considered here, the
second one would consist of just batteries while the third one would consist of both batteries
and buffer tank:
= 7 *2* 60 gal/hr
= 840 gallons. (accounts to 104% of a single working day maximum water demand).
Running the water plant (1.1 kW) requires an output of at least 1.3 kW out of the PV array
(considering wiring and conversion losses of about 5%). The previous calculation represents
ideal solar irradiance as we can see from figure (1.1) above, the global incident in coll. Plane
is almost identical to the global clear sky model i.e., no clouds or losses due to high
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temperature. Under similar conditions, buffer tank will help supplying water during early
morning and low irradiance hours from 8 am to 10 am and from 5 pm to 9 pm respectively,
however it won’t be able to meet demand during an outage of two days in a row, things will
get more complicated whenever low solar productivity occurs during weekend which leads us
to sub-case 1.B.
The above figure (8) illustrates a case extracted from PVsyst forecast where the power output
of the solar system fails for two day in a row to reach the minimum power requirements to
run the water plant which means zero gallons of water to be stored at the buffer tank during
weekend which, this led us to the conclusion that full dependency on a buffer tank without
any sort of electrical storage is not practical even under ideal solar productivity conditions.
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Figure 9 low effective energy at the output of the PV array during two days of weekend as seen in (a) and (b)
Figure 10 system was adequate in (a) as supply managed to meet demand, while in (b) we can notice a deficit of =14.3 –
10.4 = 3.9 kwh
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Figure 11 the system encountered long deficit in (a) and another short one in (b).
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conditions while there is a big chance that this is will not be the case, therefore a minimum of
3 days will be considered as minimum batteries autonomy, the minimum capacity to retain
three days of autonomy was simulated and defined as 704 Ah which require at least 8 modules
(720 Ah) this means we can reduce the number of batteries from 14 to just 8 modules, the new
system setup was simulated to verify practicality under minimum global irradiance in coll.
Plane, which was observed in January, an hourly forecast of worst-case scenario is shown
below in figures (13,14,15,16) for one week between 13th to 19th of January:
Figure 13: no sufficient power to run water plant and hence buffering tank is empty, also batteries are not fully
charged.
Figure 14 (a): First deficit = (14.3-9.648) = 4.652 kWh (b): Second deficit = 14.3-0=14.3 kWh
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Figure 15: Third deficit = 14.3-8.273 = 6.027 kWh P.V system is adequate.
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Figure 17 the state of charge SOC chart of system’s batteries at the end of each time interval.
• Thirteen hours of constant maximum demand were considered for five days, the aim of
the modified design was to meet demand’s worst-case scenario with a buffer tank and
8 modules of batteries instead of 14 modules and the previous simulation displayed
unpleasant results, the system encountered more deficits than before even with an
assumption of a prefilled tank.
• Initial design (12 * PV modules) & (14 * batteries) encountered less deficits for the
same period forecasted between 13th to 19th of January as depicted earlier in graphs
(9,10,11,12), adding a buffer tank to this design (12 PV panels & 14 batteries) will
make the system more resilient as the buffer will behave as a physical storage with
100% roundtrip efficiency which will add up to the total backup storage and mitigate
system losses resulted from unused energy due to full charged batteries.
• An additional small hardware is required to properly operate the system with buffer
tank, a level sensor which will control the RO unit switch (with delay) as the water
reaches its max level.
• Based on the above observations the final list of design components can be
summarized as shown in table (2):
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MPPT-Inverter 1
Mars rock 1000W. 20-
50VDC to 120-220VAC
MPPT Pure Sine Wave. Limited warranty
6. System Losses:
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7. Economic Evaluation:
Investment costs is shown below, table (3) includes operational and system
components costs, the same calculations were carried out using PVsyst in figure
(17):
Items Quantity Unit Price ($) Total Price ($)
PV panels 12 $0.36/Wp $2172
Support 12 $100/unit $1,200
MPPT INVERTER 1000 W 51 V 1 $4200/unit $4,200
Lithium-Solar batterie Victron Energy 24v
180ah 14 $3400/unit $47,600
The capital cost was estimated as 52,812 $. the calculation of LCOE was carried
out using financial analysis tool in PVsys with an assumption of a discount rate
of 7% and an inflation rate of 1%, as shown below in figure (19):
The calculated LCOE is as high as 4.02 $/kwh while Fewa (federal electricity and
water authority) tariff is around 0.122 $/kWh, it was no surprise that an off-grid
project utilized to power water purification plant where electricity is relatively
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cheap will not be profitable. However, the potential of making a profit out of this
project is still there and its further explained below.
Whenever Fujairah follows the lead of Dubai and open the door for net metering, the project
can be converted into an on-grid PV system, first financial gain would be through revenue
against exporting excess energy, moreover, PV inverter itself can be adjusted to compensate
reactive power and enhance the grid’s power quality during low irradiance hours using the
attached batteries, in which case PV system will mimic the functionality of a static synchronous
compensator (STATCOM), similar investment was carried out by (Rajiv K. Varma , Senior
Member, IEEE and Ehsan M. Siavashi, 2018) as depicted in figure (21):
8. Overcoming Constrains:
Dental treatment service provided by USTF is free of charge and the grid connectivity is not
an issue with a relatively low tariff, therefore the whole project justification is based on
environmental enhancement and educational benefits, due to this non-profit target, it was quite
important to minimize the investment cost and its associated operational expenses as much as
possible, this endeavour started with an attempt to reduce the number of needed batteries,
investigating the possibility of utilizing buffer tank as the only storage was studied thoroughly
but the results were not encouraging although the additional buffer tank was considered in the
final design for enhancing the system overall performance and mitigating losses. To reduce
periodic cleaning costs an additional clause will be added to the current cleaning contract which
USTF has, this is expected to be less costly than an outsource job. Importing fees were
minimized as a local supplier was selected to supply PV system components.
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9. Environmental Evaluation:
cutting off dependency on fossil fuel electricity and replace it with renewable energy resource
is going to help mitigating carbon footprint of USTF building and might open the door for
further similar investments in the future, grids electricity in UAE is mainly generated from
natural gas turbines and CCGTs (IRENA, 2015), carbon emissions accompanied with each
kWh generated by fossil fuel power plants is shown below, Fujairah government is fully
dependent on gas and CCGT power plants to generate electricity.
From the table above and considering a total consumption of 3450 kWh every year
we can calculate carbon amount accompanied with such generation: 3450*0.91 =
3125 pounds = 1417 kg. This is the same carbon sequestered by 40.3 seedings
grown for the next 10 years (U.S. Energy_Information_administration, 2020).
Many design decisions were based on their environmental benefits. Buffering tank
was considered to reduce the number of batteries needed, although the proposal
didn’t achieve its goal, having a physical product storage will surely mitigate
losses and decrease charging/discharging cycles of Li-ion batteries which will help
expanding their lifespan. Having said that, solar panels have a lifecycle
expectancy of 25 to 30 years and after that decommissioning creates a new
environmental challenge, economic viability of recycling PV panels is still
unfavourable. (Idiano D’Adamo, Michela Miliacca , Paolo Rosa, 2017) therefore,
disposing PV panels and batteries should be done properly to achieve the best
environmental enhancement results, figure (22) below shows cumulative carbon
emission savings over project lifetime:
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• C1: is the cost of the solar PV installation considering depreciation rate, the O&M
(operational and maintenance) costs and discount rate. The same was calculated via
PVsys calculation tool as C0=181500 $.
• C0 which is cost of operating the conventional setup i.e., cost of using grid’s
electricity to power the plant for 25 years with an assumed inflation rate of 1%, and a
tariff of 0.122$/kWh, C0 can be calculated as = (0.122$/kWh) *3450 kWh*25*(1.01)
^ (25) =13494.3 $.
• E0: is the GHG emissions accompanied with the original setup, which is the grids
electricity, this is originally generated by CCGT plants in Fujairah, accompanied carbon
emissions were calculated previously in chapter (9) of this report as E0= 1417 kg/year.
• E1: is the GHG emissions accompanied with the new solar generation which is assumed
to be zero.
• Therefore LCCA= (181500-13494.3)/ (1417*25) = 4.74$/kg = 4740$/tonne this can
be seen as the $ per tonne for carbon abatement using solar PV as a displacement for
natural gas.
• the average levelized carbon cost for similar purposes is somewhere between a 100
and 150 $ for each CO2 tonne as depicted below (s. julio friedmann, zhiyuan fan,
zachary byrum, emeka ochu, amar bhardwaj, and hadia sheerazi, 2020):
Figure 22: residential roof investments LCCA Figure 23: utility scale investments LCCA
As we can see from those charts, residential roof investments have higher LCCA than utility
scale investments, due to smaller scale installations, this can explain why our calculated LCCA
was relatively high, the installed capacity in our project is very small even in comparison with
standard residential roof configuration, moreover, the low tariff of FEWA maintained high
numerator value [C1-C0] in the LCCA equation: LCCA = (C1 -C0)/ (E0- E1).
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10. Conclusion:
With the none profit envelope of this project, It’s abviously a tough call to be made,
a trade off that only a governmental body with full commitment towards
environmental enhancement whould accept, our LCOE was way higher than
Fewa tarrif, the levelised cost of carbon abatement calculated here was 20 times
or higher than any LCCA of similar investments, comprimises associated with this
project were way too heavy to be shouldred by any private firm even for a noble
cause such carbon footprint mitigation. Three main factors were behind high
LCOE and LCCA values in our case, the first factor was the current grids utility
regulations which didn’t allow for net metering in Fujairah, this eridacated any
possible revenue, something might be changed in the near future, the second one
was the relatively low tariff offered by grid’s utility while the last one was the
small scale of our investemnt, a PV system setup to power a 1.1 kW water station
for 13 hours is way too small installation even in comparison with resedintial roof
investemnts, however, looking at the glass half full, the environmental
enhancement is still there a 1.4 tonne of carbon emissions could be avoided every
year, this is the same carbon sequestered by 40.3 seedings grown for ten years,
something to be considered for a better tomorrow.
11. References
o Idiano D’Adamo, Michela Miliacca , Paolo Rosa, 2017. Economic
Feasibility for Recycling of Waste Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic
Modules.
o IRENA, 2015. RENEWABLE ENERGY PROSPECTS: UAE, s.l.: s.n.
o MARTÍNEZ, J., 2015. Batteries in PV System. s.l.:Wrocław University of
Science and Technology.
o powernsun, 2020. powernsun. [Online]
Available at: www.powernsun.com
[Accessed 19 3 2020].
o Rajiv K. Varma , Senior Member, IEEE and Ehsan M. Siavashi, 2018. PV-
STATCOM: A New Smart Inverter for Voltage Control in Distribution
Systems. IEEE.
o s. julio friedmann, zhiyuan fan, zachary byrum, emeka ochu, amar
bhardwaj, and hadia sheerazi, 2020. LEVELIZED COST OF CARBON
ABATEMENT: AN IMPROVED COST-ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY
FOR A NET-ZERO EMISSIONS WORLD, s.l.: Columbia University
CGEP.
o s.r.o., S., 2017. GIS data layers of Global Horizontal Irradiation, Air
Temperature and Photovoltaic Electricity UAE, s.l.: SOLARGIS.
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