Renewable Energy Integrated Islanded Microgrid for Sustainable Irrigation—A Bangladesh Perspective

Md Asaduzzaman Shoeb and Gm. Shafiullah
Additional contact information
Md Asaduzzaman Shoeb: School of Engineering and Information Technology, Murdoch University, Perth 6150, Australia
Gm. Shafiullah: School of Engineering and Information Technology, Murdoch University, Perth 6150, Australia

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 5, 1-19

Abstract: Due to high investment and maintenance costs, the government on Bangladesh is unable to provide sufficient support for grid extension and supplying electricity to remote or rural areas. The deficit in electricity introduces a crisis in powering irrigation systems, which influences negatively the country’s dominant income-generating sector, agriculture. Islanded microgrids with solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is one of the most attractive solutions for providing power to rural areas due to their cost-effectiveness, reliability and environment-friendly attributes. Therefore, a techno-economic feasibility study has been undertaken to investigate the prospects of renewable energy-based islanded microgrids to support rural electrification to power both households and irrigation systems. Three case studies based on the operation time of irrigation pumps during the day are developed using the HOMER Pro Microgrid Analysis Tool to identify the optimised configurations for the proposed system. The optimised configurations are then assessed considering the performance matrices of the cost of electricity (COE), net present cost (NPC), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and renewable energy fraction (RF). From the analyses, it is perceived that the operation of irrigation pumps at different times of a day is a significant influence, and the optimum method considering techno-economical evaluation is to run the irrigation pumps during the daytime by solar PV. It is evident that the proposed islanded microgrid has significant potentialities in powering irrigation systems as well as rural electrification with low energy generation costs, a contribution to the reduction of global warming and to ameliorating the energy crisis in Bangladesh in order to achieve a sustainable future.

Keywords: energy crisis; irrigation; microgrid; solar photovoltaic (PV); Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/5/1283/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/5/1283/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:5:p:1283-:d:146964

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().