Cost-benefit analysis of renewable energy sources for smart grids

Abstract

This report is the author’s final year project report, presenting the research on implementation of clean energy systems as well as the development of Energy Management System Software. This report also presents the actual cost of implementations in Singapore, acquired from the official quotes provided by the vendors in Singapore. Firstly, the different costs of implementations are investigated across several vendors. The quotes provided by vendors include installation, commissioning and testing. The next step is developing Energy Management System (EMS) Software using LabVIEW. The basic task of EMS is to allow users to enter the corresponding technical specifications and costs of clean energy systems, as well as financial parameters such as debt interest rate, debt term, and inflation rate and so on, and then compute the benefit-cost ratio, NPV and simple payback year. After all the computations, EMS presents the results on the GUI and generates financial and technical reports in excel format. EMS software is also linked to weather database to take into account the historical weather data in the calculation of annual energy production by a particular clean energy system. It is also linked to the product database which contains a wide range of models for solar panels, wind turbines and fuel cells.