Decarbonizing the global power sector is a key requirement to fight climate change. Consequently, the deployment of renewable energy (RE) technologies, notably solar photovoltaic (PV), is proceeding rapidly in many regions. However, in many of these regions, the evening peak is predominantly being served by fossil-fired generators. Furthermore, as the evening peak is projected to increase in the coming years, there are plans to install more fossil-fired peaking generators. A cleaner alternative is to enable solar PV plants to provide clean power after sunset by pairing them with large-scale lithium-ion batteries to provide evening peak generation. In this work, we performed a techno-economic analysis of a solar PV plus battery (PVB) power plant using the island of Mauritius as a case study. We assessed the impacts of the battery size, inverter loading ratio (ILR), tracking type, and curtailment on the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The main results show that the LCOE of utility-scale PVB systems are comparable to that of fossil-fired peaking generators for this case study. Tracking was shown to exacerbate the clipping loss problem and its benefits on LCOE reduction decrease as the ILR increases. The availability of the PVB system to serve the evening peak was found to be high. The curtailment analysis also showed that planners must not rely solely on storage, but rather should also improve grid flexibility to keep PVB integration affordable. Overall, the practical insights generated will be useful to utility planners in charting their generation expansion strategy.
An economic analysis of the solar photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) technologies in Sweden: a case study