Feasibility of utilizing renewable energy systems for a small hotel in Ajloun city, Jordan

This paper presents a feasibility analysis for renewable energy (RE) supply options feeding a small hotel in Ajloun city located in the north part of Jordan. Both technical and economical aspects are investigated for each scenario of the considered supply options. Net present cost (NPC), renewable fraction (RF) and payback time (T-PB) are used to asses the potential of each supply option. All required modeling, simulation and evaluation are carried out using the assessment software package HOMER (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, US). The results obtained show that on-grid small wind turbine scheme is the most feasible supply option to feed the electrical loads in the hotel. With hub height of 25 m and zero sell back rate (SBR) the NPC of this configuration is $62.7 x 10(3), which is even less than that of grid-only supply option. Moreover, it is resulted in 62% RF, a T-PB of 10.9 years and a reduction of green house gas emission (GHE) of 8.8 ton per year. When the extra generated energy is sold back to grid with SBR of $0.06 (0.5 of the purchase price), the assessment parameters NPC, T-PB and GHE are reduced to $44.3 x 10(3), 0.101 ton/year and 6.6 year, respectively. In addition, the results show that the NPC of grid-connected wind energy scheme sharply decreases with the increase in the carbon tax. The authors believe that the implementation of stand-alone configurations, based on wind and hybrid wind/solar energy resources, will increase in the future. This is due to the expectations of the decrease in the costs of the main components constituting these configurations and the increase in the overall efficiencies of these schemes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.