Abstract
Bangladesh, a small developing country in South Asia, has been in energy crisis for long time that reduces country's economic growth potential. Bangladesh can actively consider a distributed power generation system alongside of its central and conventional supply system of electric power. This paper explores electricity demand and partial fulfillment of that demand through grid-connected PV system. It was found that if Bangladesh was to generate 5% of its total electricity demand by solar energy by 2020, it could be achieved by exploiting only 13% of her total technical potential. Life cycle cost analysis shows the cost of energy from gridconnected PV system is 25.5 US cents/KWh, which is much higher than the cost of electricity generated from combined cycle gas turbine. Considering the externality benefit of solar PV systems, the government should offer 30-40% of total installation cost as subsidy. This subsidy requires the government to allocate 1-1.5% of total government budget from 2010 to 2020.
