TECHNO-ECONOMIC STUDY OF INSTALLING 10 MW PV POWER PLANT IN SUDAN

This work investigates the installation of a 10 MW solar PV power plant in a sustainable city in Sudan. Initially, the climatic data such as relative humidity, temperature and horizontal solar radiation over 30 cities in Sudan were collected from NASA web page, then the behavior of all climatic data was analyzed. Annual daily solar radiation on a tilted surface was also calculated over the 30 locations around the country. It was found that the maximum value of tilted average solar radiation is 6.61 KWh/day at Dungola from fixed mode and 8.93 kWh/m(2)/day from tracking mode. Consequently, the location was selected as an optimum spot for building the solar PV power plant. Additionally, the available solar PV panels on the market were judged according to the maximum module efficiency and high ratio value of module capacity to frame area. The project lifetime is considered as 25 years. RETScreen v.4 software was used to simulate the feasibility analysis of the project based on electric power generated from fixed and tracking modes of operation, financial analysis and greenhouse gas emissions. The study showed that, technically, the proposed plant can generate up to 16.209 GWh of electric energy annually from the fixed system and 21.828 GWh from the tracking system. Environmentally, the annual net GHG reduction is 16,000 and 21,600 tons of CO2 from fixed and tracking systems respectively. From a financial standpoint, the cost-effective indicators were calculated and it was found that the IRR and paybaCk period for the fixed system plant were 0.6% and 23.6 years, respectively. While for tracking system plant, figures were 2.66% and 19.4 years, respectively.