Abstract

Many efforts have been made to increase the utilization of renewable energy resources (RESs) in Iran. This paper aimed to evaluate the techno‐economic performance of an introduced hybrid microgrid (HMG) in eight climate zones of Iran. Therefore, ten cities are selected from the eight climate conditions of Iran. An electricity pricing strategy is also implemented according to the electricity tariffs defined by the Ministry of Energy (MOE) of Iran. The proposed electricity pricing strategy is applied to the HOMER software for investigating the optimal system configuration, RES electricity generation, and the economics of each understudy city. Optimization results indicate that Urmia (in moderate and rainy climate zone) has the least net present cost (NPC) (−5839$) and levelized cost of energy (COE) (−0.0122 $/kWh), whereas Golestan (in semimoderate and rainy climate zone) has the highest NPC (4520 $) and COE (0.012 $/kWh). It is shown that the combination of photovoltaic (PV)/wind turbine (WT)/converter in the grid‐connected operation mode is the most economical configuration. Moreover, the cities with higher potentials of wind speed and solar irradiance have lower NPC and COE. It is concluded that the utilization of the battery energy storage (BES) is technically and economically infeasible for all eight climate zones, even if the stored electricity is sold to the grid. Two sensitivity analyses are conducted to the electricity feed‐in‐tariff (FiT) and solar module price, respectively. The first sensitivity analysis indicates that by increasing FiT, more contribution of RESs is seen, which leads to lower COE and NPC. Furthermore, the two cities of Urmia and Yazd have the highest NPC and COE reductions. The second sensitivity analysis studies the module price impacts on the NPC and COE of each understudy city. It is revealed that the PV module price has a considerable effect on NPC and COE. However, this effect is more significant in some cities such as Bam, where a linear relationship is seen between the module price and economic results (NPC and COE).

Since soiling is a site-specific problem, this paper for the first time performs controlled experiments to determine the characteristics of a dust sample from the desert region of Iran and its impact on the power efficiency of solar photovoltaic modules. Dust characterization experiments are performed using scanning electron microscope, X-ray fluorescence, and elemental mapping. Elemental mapping tests, which have attracted little attention in photovoltaic soiling studies, will help researchers to investigate this phenomenon more accurately. For electrical evaluations, general relationships between losses caused by dust deposition and degradation of photovoltaic output parameters are obtained by testing different dust samples. The elemental results showed that the dust sample is mostly composed of Si, O, Al, and Ca elements. In addition, indoor experiments revealed that dust particles have different shapes and sizes (from 0.4 μm to 31 μm). When the dust density is increased from clean cell to almost dark shading conditions, it was observed that conversion efficiency, photovoltaic normalized maximum power, open-circuit current, and short-circuits current are decreased by 98.2% (non- linearly), 98.13% (non-linearly), 20.63% (linearly), and 98.02% (non-linearly), respectively. Furthermore, the results showed that soiling process has no significant impact on fill factor due to uniform dust dispersion on PV module.

Sadat, SA,Vakilalroaya fini, MR, Hashemi-Dezaki, H., Nazififard, M. “Barrier Analysis of Solar PV Energy Development in the Context of Iran using Fuzzy MCDM Methods”, Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments,Vol.47, October 2021, (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seta.2021.101549).

Abstract