Investigate the Feasibility of Parabolic Dish (PD) Based on Several Prospective Factors in Malaysia *MOHD RUDDIN AB GHANI 1 ， LIAW GEOK PHENG 1 , ROSNANI AFFANDI 1 , ZANARIAH JANO 2 1 Faculty of Electrical Engineering, 2 Centre for Languages and Human Development, 1,2 Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), 76100, Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia Malaysia *Corresponding author, email: dpdrudin@utem.edu.my Abstract: - Promoting the use of Renewable Energy (RE) resources has become one of the top government agendas throughout the world. However, in order to develop RE such as Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) in Malaysia, several key factors that affect the performance of this system should be thoroughly investigated. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the feasibility of implementing Parabolic Dish (PD) based on CSP in Malaysia by evaluating the CSP technologies, Meteorological data, Direct Solar Irradiance (DNI), global Parabolic Dish development, sites selection, and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of the PD system. Key-Words: - Renewable Energy (RE), Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI), Parabolic Dish (PD), Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) 1 Introduction It is expected that future energy will be less dependent on fossil fuel. This is due to an increasing production from Renewable Energy (RE) resources such as solar, biomass, wind and etc. Generally, solar energy is one of the REs with a great potential, cleanliness and by far the most abundant energy resource on earth [1, 2, 3]. It can be converted to electrical energy in two ways; PV system and CSP system. PV and CSP collect different fractions of solar resource and have different production capabilities as well as different region to develop their power plants. These two systems use different technologies to generate electricity. CSP technologies use mirrors or lenses to concentrate the solar radiation for heating liquid inside receiver and producing steam; the steam then drives a turbine generator to generate electricity in much the same way as the conventional power plants. Interestingly, CSP can be equipped with thermal storage system to generate electricity even during cloudy or after sunset [4]. CSP has different structure; therefore it will generate different results on the temperatures, concentrating ratio and the efficiencies. Generally, there are four types of CSP technologies as shown in Fig 1; Parabolic Troughs system, Linear Fresnel system, Parabolic Dish System and Power Tower system [5]. Fig. 1: Four type of the CSP technologies [5] CSP systems can be differentiated into line focusing and point focusing systems. Two major types of line focusing systems are Parabolic Trough and Linear Fresnel, while the Parabolic Dish and Power Tower are point focusing systems. Line focusing system is equipped with single axis tracking system. It can concentrate sun rays about 100 times and reach operating temperature up to 150°C [3,6,7]. For point focusing systems such as Parabolic Dish system and Power Tower system, they are able to concentrate sunlight as far as 1,000 times and reach operating temperature more than 1000°C [6-8]. Point focusing systems are equipped Recent Advances in Renewable Energy Sources ISBN: 978-1-61804-303-0 121