Evaluating the Opportunities and Challenges of Domestic PV Installation in Saudi Arabia Based on Field Deployment in Jeddah

Despite the abundance of solar resources and significant electrical demand during the daytime, residential PV installations are rarely found in Saudi Arabia due to unfavorable economics, resulting from low electricity tariffs by global standards. This work reports on opportunities and challenges of residential PV installation in Saudi Arabia based on the deployment process and analyses of the performance of two 15 kWp PV systems installed on the rooftops of two similar villas in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For each villa, 18 months of electrical consumption and ambient temperature were available pre-installation, followed by 24 months of post-installation PV system monitoring, including incident radiation, generation, and import from the grid. A linear model of the consumption of the villas fitted between 0.016 and 0.019 kWh/m2 per cooling degree day, with varying levels of interception. No significant change was observed post-installation of the PV system. On average, the reduction in overall electrical import from the grid was 20–30%. A financial analysis based on the real costs and performance of the installed systems found that the net billing feed-in tariff should be increased to SAR 1.0–1.5 (USD 0.27–0.40), depending on a range of other possible measures, in order to stimulate the growth in residential rooftop PVs.