Analysis of the cost of reliable electricity: A new method for analyzing grid connected solar, diesel and hybrid distributed electricity systems considering an unreliable electric grid, with examples in Uganda

Patrick Mark Murphy, Ssennoga Twaha and Inês S. Murphy

Energy, 2014, vol. 66, issue C, 523-534

Abstract: More than 1.3 billion people lack access to grid electricity. Uganda provides a typical example of an under-electrified country, with less than 12% of Ugandans having access. To address the lack of electricity access, there has been much analysis devoted to grid-connected distributed generation. What these analyses lack is a consideration that even where grid electricity reaches people, it is not always reliable; customers often experience hundreds of outage hours per month. This paper addresses this analytical shortfall to provide new methods to analyze reliable electricity and identify optimal systems to provide more reliable electricity. We adapt the HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables) in this work to address unreliable electricity from the grid, and develop a method for determining optimal system configurations and predicting electricity costs for reliable power generation in regions with unreliable grid electricity. We demonstrate the method for a village in Uganda, but the method holds universally. Results indicate that diesel is the most economical choice, but slight increases in diesel and decreases in PV (photovoltaics) prices make solar/diesel hybrid systems competitive. Improved reliability increases cost, but the increase of can be justified for users needing more reliability.

Keywords: Grid-connected PV systems; Distributed energy systems; Reliability; Availability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214000279
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:energy:v:66:y:2014:i:c:p:523-534

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2014.01.020

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

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