Analysis of photovoltaic mini-grid systems for remote locations: A techno-economic approach

Abstract

Summary This paper presents a techno‐economic analysis of photovoltaic mini‐grid systems (PMs), using a group of remote houses in 3 locations in Nigeria, as case studies. It uses a worst‐case users' load demand approach for the design and analysis of the proposed energy system, according to international technical standards. It presents detailed capacity, yield and losses, battery state of charge (SoC), reliability, users' load demand increase (Ldi), and life cycle economic analyses by using the Hybrid Optimisation for Electric Renewables (HOMER) simulation tool. The effect of 25% Ldi is also considered in the paper. The study can be used to develop a practical energy model to address the poor energy situation in those locations when they are implemented. Results indicate that PMs of 68, 76, and 61 kW can meet the users' demand of ~63 500 kWh/year with an availability of 99.2% for the locations, respectively. By including a 30‐kVA diesel generator to the PMs' model, an availability of 100% was obtained, demonstrating that the issue of loss of energy supply for several days in the year due to users' Ldi and the cloudy days is being addressed. The results further show that although the hybrid energy systems have relatively higher initial capital, total life cycle and replacement costs, and the cost of energy, they achieve a higher reliability compared with the proposed PMs. The research can be useful for planning solar PV infrastructure for remote locations around the world.

Challenges of Microgrids in Remote Communities: A STEEP Model Application

“…The research on some aspects of stability in microgrids has been published focusing on the stability aspects of remote, utility-connected and facility microgrids, and the modes of operation, control topology, types of micro sources and the network parameters [37]. The analysis of photovoltaic mini-grid systems for remote locations in a developing country has been presented, using the techno-economic evaluation approach [38]. A review of the protection challenges in microgrid systems has been discussed presenting the protection problems resulting from microgrid's application in distribution power system and the classification of the protection schemes [39].…”

“…Some other papers have focused on the review of control strategies of microgrid and autonomous applications with the aim of achieving proper and effective coordination of a cluster of microgrids in electrical systems for optimal operation [6,7,9,11,12,17,21,25,26]. In addition, some of the studies presented the review of protection challenges and principles relating to microgrid systems [10,16,25,35,39], while the contributions on the techno-economic and impact analysis and application of rural microgrids were made in [18,32,38]. A review of classification of topologies of hybrid microgrids, classification of topologies and optimal considerations were achieved in [20,27,29], while the remaining contributions are based on the concept, stability and power quality issues of autonomous microgrid systems [30,31,36,37].…”

Implementation of repowering optimization for an existing photovoltaic‐pumped hydro storage hybrid system: A case study in Sichuan, China

“…32,33 For the single-objective analysis, it can be regarded as a subset of Pareto front in Plenty of literature takes techno-economic index as objective function.…”

“…Plenty of literature takes techno-economic index as objective function. 32,33 For the single-objective analysis, it can be regarded as a subset of Pareto front in…”

A CRITIC-TOPSIS framework for hybrid renewable energy systems evaluation under techno-economic requirements

“…These groups are characterised with performance indices whose maximum and minimum desired by decisionmakers. This makes the selection of a suitable HRES for a system to be based on compromise solutions that are generated with established multi-criteria multi-decision (MCMD) frameworks (Tsoutsos et al, 2009;Wimmler et al, 2015;Akinyele, 2018). These frameworks results are useful during national energy policies formulation with respect to energy production and generation (Pokharel and Chandrashekar, 1998).…”