Technical and economic potential of PV in Lebanon and Jordan aiming for regional readiness level development

This paper provides an approach to calculate the technical and economic potential for photovoltaic (PV) power generation in Lebanon and Jordan as an initial attempt to regionally quantify energy. The technical potential was estimated using analytical and GIS (Geographic Information System) based methods having sets of constraints and assumptions. Moreover, the economic potential is also estimated using GIS. The results of this study indicate a calculated technical potential with a total of 21330 TWh/a in both Lebanon and Jordan compared to the analytically calculated technical potential of 20941 TWh/a. As for the economically feasible energy production, the expected total electricity production is 596 TWh/a. The GIS method provides a regional visualization of the potentials on the map showing regions with high and low potentials. Having projects in the PV sector can clearly cover a significant share of the demand, knowing that the economic potential in this approach shows an energy production with an order of magnitude higher than the total electricity demand of 26.7 TWh/a. The concepts of technology readiness level (TRL) together with the results obtained from the study motivate the introduction of a new concept in standardizing PV installed capacity maturities called Regional Readiness Levels (RRL). The RRL notion ranks regions according to parameters based on market potential of PV, aiming to overcome communication barriers within the PV community.