Economic Evaluation of Exploiting Solar Energy to Provide Electrical Energy

Providing electrical energy is one of the main concerns when constructing a new building for business, agricultural, or residential purposes in remote areas. On these occasions, an economic analysis should be done to make an appropriate decision for providing electrical energy to these areas. In this paper, an approach is proposed for economic evaluation of a plan to exploit solar energy in order to provide electricity for those consumers who have not access to the national electricity grid. On the other hand, those consumers who have access to the national grid may also use a variety of techniques and methods such as solar energy exploitation to manage their consumption and cut their electricity costs. Besides for generating electrical energy, solar energy may be used for direct provision of heat requirements, and this will lead to a cut in fossil fuel costs. In this paper, a method is also proposed for economic evaluation of using solar energy in buildings which are close to the national grid in order to manage electricity consumption and also to decrease fossil fuel costs. Related numerical studies are presented along with analysis of the sensitivity to changes in economic parameters.