Economic evaluation of hybrid energy systems for rural electrification in six geo-political zones of Nigeria

Lanre Olatomiwa, Saad Mekhilef, A.S.N. Huda and Olayinka S. Ohunakin

Renewable Energy, 2015, vol. 83, issue C, 435-446

Abstract: Rural electrification improves the quality of life of rural dwellers having limited or non-access to electricity through decentralized electricity coverage. Since the price of oil is unstable and fluctuating day by day and grid expansion is not also a cost effective solution, integrating renewable energy sources thus become an important alternative for rural electrification. The present study investigated the feasibility of different power generation configurations comprising solar array, wind turbine and diesel generator in different locations within the geo-political zones of Nigeria. Six rural communities were randomly chosen from each of the six geo-political zones in Nigeria with the intention that the results of the study could be replicated in other remote locations of the selected zones with similar terrains. HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable) simulation software was used to determine the economic feasibility of the systems. The simulations concentrated on the net present costs, cost of energy and renewable fraction of the given hybrid configurations for all the climatic zones. The analysis indicates that the PV/diesel/battery hybrid renewable system configuration is found as optimum architecture for both sensitivity cases of 1.1 and $1.3/l of diesel. It also displayed better performance in fuel consumption and CO2 reduction.

Keywords: Hybrid system; Optimization; Rural electrification; Economic evaluation; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148115003377
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:83:y:2015:i:c:p:435-446

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2015.04.057

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().