ECONOMIC FEASIBILITY OF INSTALLING PV SYSTEMS IN HOUSES BASED ON THE POLICY OF SAUDI ARABIA: BURAYDAH CITY AS A CASE STUDY

Recently, the government of Saudi Arabia has adopted the regulations of the SmallScale Solar PV Systems. These regulations allow consumers in the residential, commercial, industrial and agriculture sectors to install grid-connected PV systems in their properties, and enables them to inject the extra generated energy into the utility grid or receive their needs of energy. The scheme regulates and governs the relationship between the consumer and the authority of electricity. The adopted tariff of energy exchange is not encouraging to push consumers in Saudi Arabia to install PV systems in their properties. So, the need for investigating the economic feasibility of installing PV systems from the consumer side arises. In this paper, the RETscreen package has been used to simulate different cases of PV installations in Buraydah city which located in the middle of Saudi Arabia as a case study, considering the meteorological properties of Buraydah city, the energy demand of houses in the city, and the current prices of PV system components in local market based on the new regulations and energy exchange tariff to determine the feasibility of installing grid-connected PV systems in houses. The results showed the feasibility of installing the grid-connected PV systems in houses if the PV system designed to generate the annual energy demand of house or less with payback time around 10 years and the LCOE was 0.095 SAR/kWh