In the first half of the chapter, an overview of financing and bankability of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants is provided, with a slight touch on microgrid PV financing. The discussion revolves around risk management, which requires rigorous assessment of the financial viability.
PV financial models are used by project developers, banks and asset managers to evaluate the profitability of a PV project. The objective of this work is to present an overview of current practices for financial modelling of PV investments and to review them in view of technical and financial risks during the different phases of a PV project.
Integration of solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage systems is an upward trend for residential sector to achieve major targets like minimizing the electricity bill, grid dependency, emission and so forth. In recent years, there has been a rapid deployment of PV and battery installation in residential sector.
There are many types of financing structures that can be applied to PV projects, such as corporate financing, which typically has an on-balance-sheet struc-ture as aforementioned, project financing, crowd sourcing, or even personal credit lines.
Global solar PV capacity and annual addition . Solar PV is the most popular renewable energy resource in residential sector. A solar PV system in a grid-connected system would supply the load and export the extra power to the main grid with an feed-in-tariff (FIT).
The risk in financing a solar project can be mitigated with proper assessment of the financial and technical viabilities. While the financial viability depends highly on the financing structure and contractual terms, confidence in the technical viability mostly comes from the solar resource assessment exercise.