الفهرس 
Evaluating Economic and Environmental Impacts of Photovoltaic Systems on Commercial Buildings and Grid Connection Requirements
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Abstract
Fossil fuel resources of electricity are too costly nowadays due to their limited
availability in restricted locations across the world. In Egypt, the government has
launched a plan to reduce electricity subsidy since 2014 until 2019. In addition, the
government is encouraging customers to apply renewable energy solutions as infinite
sources of electricity. The total energy from distributed sources in Egypt has reached
131,148 GWh by 2019, while the expected average increase in distributed energy is
2% annually. The commercial sector represents about 11.5% of the total customers in
Egypt, with energy of 8,372 GWh that represents about 6.4% of the energy use in
Egypt. Hence, the commercial sector is one of the main key players of energy savers
and environmental development sectors in Egypt, where most of commercial
buildings have started to decrease their consumption such as Cairo Festival City Mall
(CFCM), which has large energy consumption about 130.8 GWh/year.
The first part of this thesis tried to enhance the energy production in CFCM by
installing a Photovoltaic (PV) plant on roof top which will help to reduce the energy
consumed from utility grid and thus to decrease the consumption of fossil fuels which
will improve the environmental issues. Hence, Leadership of Engineering and
Environmental Design (LEED) standards have also been applied for auditing the
building. By utilizing the unusable areas of CFCM to apply PV plant, there are two
scenarios are investigated. The first scenario aims to evaluate the profit when selling
the generated energy from the PV plant to the utility grid through Feed-In-Tariff (FIT)
program that is launched by the government, while the second scenario investigates
reducing the energy consumed from utility using generated energy. Huge financial
benefits can be achieved as the payback period of the Photovoltaic system is estimated
by 7.7 and 12.91 years when applying first and second scenario respectively.
To implement such model of PV plant successfully, its effects on utility grid
should be carefully studied out. However, it does not exist yet, so an already existing 5
MW PV plant in Sharm El-Sheikh has been chosen to investigate its effects on utility
grid in the second part of this thesis. This part illustrates the grid connection
parameters when connecting a renewable energy plant and evaluates its performance
also by comparing the calculated energy production from different simulation
programs used recently for designing PV plants, and the actual energy produced from
the same plant at real location. Then, the environmental effects of PV plant have been
studied, and the amount of saving in CO2 has been calculated and compared with the
actual emissions produced from generating the same amount of energy from fossil fuel
plants. This shows how the solar energy has saved about 5,116 tons of CO2 for
producing about 10,000 MWhr.