Techno-Economic Evaluation of Very Large-Scale Photovoltaic Power Plant, Case Study:Eastern Morocco

Exploiting the solar energy resources of Morocco will certainly reduce its dependency on imported fossil fuels and can also lead to the reduction of the Kingdom’s energy bill. In order to study whether the implementation of a very large scale photovoltaic under Moroccan climate is technically and economically feasible, we present in this paper a techno-economic assessment of 100 MW Photovoltaic power plant for the electricity production in Oujda city (eastern Morocco), and we compare it with Dagget city (California - USA) and Almeria (Spain), where they are both countries are the pioneers of solar power-generation. Solar Advisor Model software is used to evaluate the monthly energy production, annual energy output, Capacity factor and the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). The results indicate that the annual energy generation for the plant supposed installed in Oujda is 187.11 GWh, the performance ratio is 79 %, the capacity factor is 19.5 %, and finally, the LCOE is 0.06 $/kWh, which is quite interesting. These results are supposed to encourage the Moroccan government to exploit a large-scale photovoltaic for electricity production, which will lead to a sustainable development of this region of Morocco and encourage the government to start manufacturing its own PV panels to create new jobs and reduce the cost of importing panels from other countries.