The economic feasibility of utilizing small-scale solar PV systems in the residential sector based on Saudi regulations

Recently, the government of Saudi Arabia has adopted the regulations of the small-scale solar PV systems. These regulations allow consumers in the residential, commercial, industrial, and agriculture sectors to install grid-connected PV systems in their properties and allow them to inject the extra generated energy into the utility grid or receive their needs of energy. The scheme regulates and governs the relationship between the consumer and the authority of electricity. The adopted tariff of energy exchange is not encouraging to push consumers in Saudi Arabia to install PV systems in their properties. So, the need for investigating the economic feasibility of installing PV systems from the consumer side arises. In this paper, the RETscreen package has been used to simulate different cases of PV installations in five cities across Saudi Arabia (Tabuk, Buraydah, Jeddah, Najran, and Dammam), considering the meteorological properties of each city, the energy demand of houses, and the current prices of PV system components in the local market. The investigation was done based on the new regulations and new energy exchange tariff to determine the feasibility of installing grid-connected PV systems in houses. The results showed the feasibility of installing the grid-connected PV systems in houses if the PV system designed to generate the annual energy demand of house or less with payback time around 10 years and the LCOE was 0.095 SAR/kWh. The study also showed that the increasing in the capacity of the PV system more than the annual demand will be infeasible economically as the size of the PV system increased more than the actual energy demand.