Powered by the sun: designing and analyzing technical and economic aspects of a school sustained by photovoltaics

Abstract

Turkey has a young population. Accordingly, 66849 schools are serving under the Ministry of National Education. This amount of school naturally causes large amounts of electrical energy demand. Supporting even a small part of these schools with renewable energy sources will provide enormous economic and environmental contributions. Moreover, school buildings often share a template architecture, so a design can be reused, with some modifications over and over again. In this study, the PVsyst software is used to design a 9.9 kWp, roof-mounted, and grid-connected photovoltaic system. The technical and economic consequences of the study are widely reported within. IEC 61724 standards, which is a framework solar industry standard, is applied. Depending on the results, the system can generate 13.13 MWh of electricity annually, 6.43 MWh of which the consumer uses, and 6.70 MWh could be sold to the network. Selling electricity is limited by legislative regulations. But the demand for energy is a fact that never changes. As a result, PV cell efficiency is 17.09 %, and total system loss was approximately 26.18 %. The project cost was calculated as roughly $9912 in the year 2020, based on current prices for a standard system. Total economic earnings from sales are determined as approximately $1375. The return period of the investment was calculated as five years. It is anticipated that the engineering practice carried out in this study will prevent 8 tons of CO2 emissions annually and will save approximately 25 trees per year. It is recommended that this study be put into practice and disseminated.