Development of Stand-Alone Green Hybrid System for Rural Areas

Solomon Kiros, Baseem Khan, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban, Hassan Haes Alhelou, Zbigniew Leonowicz, Om Prakash Mahela and Jens Bo Holm-Nielsen
Additional contact information
Solomon Kiros: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mekelle University, Mekelle 0231, Ethiopia
Baseem Khan: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hawassa University, Hawassa 05, Ethiopia
Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban: Center for Bio-Energy and Green Engineering, Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Niels Bohrs Vej 8, 6700 Esbjerg, Denmark
Hassan Haes Alhelou: Department of Electrical Power Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Tishreen University, Lattakia 2230, Syria
Zbigniew Leonowicz: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wyb. Wyspianskiego 27, 50370 Wroclaw, Poland
Om Prakash Mahela: Power System Planning Division, Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Prasaran Nigam Ltd., Jaipur 302005, India
Jens Bo Holm-Nielsen: Center for Bio-Energy and Green Engineering, Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Niels Bohrs Vej 8, 6700 Esbjerg, Denmark

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: Despite the tremendous efforts exhibited by various utilities around the world during the past few years, there are still exceedingly many remote regions unreached by the electrical grid. For those regions, the enormous available potential of renewable energy resources is believed to be useful for the development of a stand-alone power supply system. This paper presents the modeling of a stand-alone hybrid system for the remote area of Ethiopia. A comparison of the economic performance of various scenarios of a stand-alone photovoltaic (PV)-wind hybrid system, with battery storage and diesel as a backup for electrifying remote rural areas, is presented. Therefore, a practical example, Kutur village of Awlio kebele of the Axum district, Ethiopia (which is 30 km away from the closest national grid) is considered for this research. Two electric load scenarios are estimated by considering the set of incandescent and efficient lamps for lighting for the 120 existing households. The above-mentioned solar radiation and wind speed are then used as an input to simulate the hybrid set-up for the high and low load estimation using HOMER software. The simulation result shows that the net present costs (NPC) corresponding to the high and low load scenarios is $262,470 and $180,731, respectively. Besides, an essential load forecasting is performed to see the effect of the increase in electric demand of the community on the required investment to install a stand-alone hybrid set-up. The NPC after load forecasting is found to be more than three folds of the NPC required for the reference year. In both cases, the simulation results indicate that using a stand-alone PV-wind hybrid system with battery storage and a diesel generator as a backup for electrifying Kutur village is cost-effective and comparable against the cost required for electrifying the village by extending the grid.

Keywords: grid access; hybrid PV-wind; battery storage; diesel generator; HOMER (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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