Sensitivity-Indices-Based Risk Assessment of Large-Scale Solar PV Investment Projects

Large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) generation is now a viable, economically feasible and clean energy supply option. Incentive schemes, such as the Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) in Ontario, have attracted large-scale investments in solar PV generation. In a previous work, the authors presented an investor-oriented planning model for optimum selection of solar PV investment decisions. In this paper, a method for determining the sensitivity indices, based on the application of duality theory on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, pertaining to the solar PV investment model is presented. The sensitivity of the investors' profit to various parameters, for a case study in Ontario, Canada are presented and discussed and these are found to be very close to those obtained using the Monte Carlo simulation and finite-difference (individual parameter perturbation) based approaches. Furthermore, a novel relationship is proposed between the sensitivity indices and the investor's profit for a given confidence level to evaluate the risk for an investor in solar PV projects.