Buildings through their energy and materials consumption have an important contribution in the global energy and environmental scenario that faces serious challenges. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest per capita energy and environmental emissions. The buildings sector accounts for almost 80% of the total national electricity consumption. To address the energy and environmental problems facing the country, it is important to promote sustainability in the building sector. Renewable energy can be an effective solution to provide environmentally friendly energy to buildings. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has rich potential for solar energy. Solar photovoltaic (PV) can be an appropriate technology to harness the immense solar potential. This study focuses on the assessment of solar PV potential in the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), one of the largest universities in the kingdom. It employs PVsyst and RETScreen programs to investigate the potential for solar PV on the roof tops of the entire campus buildings, offering a total site area of 505,164 m2 of rooftop areas. Optimization for PV implementation was done for the power generation between tilted and horizontal PV systems. The findings of the work reveal that application of PV systems on the KFUPM building roof tops can produce 37,746 MWh/year and 46,047 MWh/year for tilted and horizontal PV systems respectively. This amount of generated energy covers 16.4% and 20% of KFUPM’s total electricity consumption. The study also investigated the economic feasibility of the two systems using many economic parameters such as benefit to cost ratio (BCR), simple payback period (SPP), and equity periods. Finally, an estimation of the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions as an environmental feasibility analysis was carried out. It was calculated that the utilization of tilted PV systems save the environment from 32,952 tons CO2/year, and the horizontal PV systems  save it from 40,199 tons CO2/year.

Conference Title

International Congress on Energy and Environment Engineering and Management

Conference Country

France

Conference Date

July 14, 2015 - Jan. 1, 2016

Conference Sponsor

International Congress on Energy and Environment Engineering and Management