Author
Listed:
- Joy N. A. Ashitey
(Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Cyprus International University, Nicosia 99258, North Cyprus, Turkey)
- Mehrshad Radmehr
(Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Cyprus International University, Nicosia 99258, North Cyprus, Turkey)
- Glenn P. Jenkins
(Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Cyprus International University, Nicosia 99258, North Cyprus, Turkey
Department of Economics, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Cambridge Resources International Inc., Cambridge, MA 02140, USA)
- Mikhail Miklyaev
(Department of Economics, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Cambridge Resources International Inc., Cambridge, MA 02140, USA)
Abstract
For a country to be able to sustain a policy of increasing the use of renewable energy sources to supply electricity, it must be able to continue to provide a reliable electricity supply service to its customers. Typically, electricity reliability is maintained by thermal electricity generation. To substitute solar PV for thermal electricity generation to a significant degree, it is imperative to determine the least-cost complementary technologies that will provide system reliability. In many parts of Africa and Asia, potential sites for seasonal storage dams are available or have been built. In the case studied here, maintaining service reliability by expanding the capacity of the generation plant of a seasonal storage dam in all scenarios is less costly than providing service reliability by a thermal alternative. However, maintaining service reliability while expanding generation by solar PV is in all cases costly. The levelized financial cost of the incremental energy supplied when a reliable service is maintained is between 30% and 89% greater than the levelized cost of a standalone solar PV plant. For the same set of scenarios, the range of the economic levelized cost is 28% to 85% greater with reliability than the standalone solar PV field without reliability. Given the circumstances of the electricity market, the least-cost technology to maintain a reliable service may be specific to the market. The analysis also shows that when the economic opportunity cost of funds increases from 2% to 11.5%, the levelized cost of renewable electricity generation systems doubles. Hence, if the developed countries of the world want low-income countries to maintain policies to reduce the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, capital subsidies to low-income countries that are facing high economic opportunity costs of funds are likely to be necessary.
Suggested Citation
Joy N. A. Ashitey & Mehrshad Radmehr & Glenn P. Jenkins & Mikhail Miklyaev, 2025.
"Seasonal Hydropower Storage Dams: Are They Cost-Effective in Providing Reliability for Solar PV?,"
Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(9), pages 1-22, April.
Handle:
RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:9:p:4076-:d:1647159
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:9:p:4076-:d:1647159. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.