Volume 12: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part I

PV integration potential with infrastructures in steel industry and its techno-economic analysis Chuanhui He, Mingkun Jiang, Ziyi Xu, Dongzi Hu, Dadi Wu, Wendong Wei*, Jinyue Yan*

Abstract

The high energy consumption of the steel industry has been a major challenge for the sustainability and environmental protection. Steel companies, the backbone of heavy industry in China take a vital position in climate change mitigation. To pursue sustainability and decrease emissions, an increasing number of steel companies tend to seek help from renewable energy. Integrating solar photovoltaics (PV) at steel plants is promising to reach the target. This paper investigates the potential capacity, potential output and economic performance of PV technology of 228 steel plants in China. The results indicate that the huge potential capacity and output are up to 6.96×106 KW and 9.71×109 kWh, respectively. Moreover, the ROI and profit under all self-consumption scenarios and all feed-into grid scenarios are evaluated, which shows integrating PV into the steel industry is also profitable. Among two scenarios, the all self-consumption scenario earns a higher ROI and profit compared with the all feed-into grid scenario.

Keywords PV integration, PV potential, steel industry, techno-economic analysis