Building a Sustainable Energy Community: Design and Integrate Variable Renewable Energy Systems for Rural Communities

Jawed Mustafa, Fahad Awjah Almehmadi (), Saeed Alqaed and Mohsen Sharifpur ()
Additional contact information
Jawed Mustafa: Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Najran University, P.O. Box 1988, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Fahad Awjah Almehmadi: Department of Applied Mechanical Engineering, College of Applied Engineering, Muzahimiyah Branch, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia
Saeed Alqaed: Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Najran University, P.O. Box 1988, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Mohsen Sharifpur: Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 21, 1-21

Abstract: This study proposes a decentralized hybrid energy system consisting of solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines (WT) connected with the local power grid for a small Najran, Saudi Arabia community. The goal is to provide the selected community with sustainable energy to cover a partial load of the residential buildings and the power requirements for irrigation. For this, a dynamic model was constructed to estimate the hourly energy demand for residential buildings consisting of 20 apartments with a total floor area of 4640 m 2 , and the energy requirements for irrigation to supply a farm of 10,000 m 2 with water. Subsequently, HOMER software was used to optimize the proposed hybrid energy system. Even considering the hourly fluctuations of renewable energies, the artificial neural network (ANN) successfully estimated PV and wind energy. Based on the mathematical calculations, the final R-square values were 0.928 and 0.993 for PV and wind energy, respectively. According to the findings, the cost of energy (COE) for the optimized hybrid energy system is $0.1053/kWh with a renewable energy penetration of 65%. In addition, the proposed system will save 233 tons of greenhouse gases annually.

Keywords: community sustainable energy; on-grid hybrid system; PV/wind energy; HOMER; ANN (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/13792/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/13792/ (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:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:21:p:13792-:d:951914

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

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