Design and Modelling of Solar Energy System for Electrification for a Hospital in Saudi Arabia

Electricity is crucial for delivering services such as lighting, equipment, HVAC systems, water heating, and communication. Refrigerators for vaccines and emergency surgery, laboratory, and diagnostic equipment are all require constant electricity supply. One of the largest users of electricity in the KSA are the healthcare centers. The objective of this paper is to design, model, simulate and analysis the performance of a solar PV panels system to supply health-care center by electricity that will be used for lighting, equipment, and air-conditioning. A selected health-care center is Al-Eis Health-Care Center (AHCC) in Al-Eis, Saudi Arabia, is considered as the case for the study. This health-care center needs approximately 162 kWh per day. 49 PV panels with 56 lead-acid batteries are enough to provide 72 kWh/day (for lighting and equipment operation). Energy is produced in the form of direct current (DC), and then converted to alternating current (AC) using an inverter. When the amount of available sunlight is minimal, a battery bank stores some of the DC power that may be utilized later. Extra power can be sold to the utility grid. In addition, a simulation of a solar absorption cooling system (SACS) is described in this study. This work was based on a single-stage absorption cooling machine powered by the NH3-H2O solution with cooling capacity of 15 kW. The COP for cooling system was determined to be 1.75 at Tgen = 90 ºC. With an effective collector area of 28.41 m2, 14 evacuated-tube collectors are needed to be installed in two strings over the 84 m2 of backyard space in order to provide the necessary cooling. The cost for the entire PV panel and collectors’ system was predicted to be 68,755 USD.