Cost estimation of different electric systems for rural areas in developing countries

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a new methodology to design the electric power distribution network for rural areas of developing countries. Thus, in the context of the current emergence of new generation and storage technologies, this paper describes different means to electrify developing countries ; by MV systems or by autonomous systems with planned location of small generation and storage. There is also a cost quantification of these different architectures by the way of a cost calculation software which has been developed to size and compare the considered solutions. For each strategy, we calculate investment costs and yearly costs (maintenance and energy cost). So the updated assessment over 20 years can be calculated and the strategies comparison gives the best solution for each electrification problem.

MILP-based heuristics for the design of rural community electrification projects

“…Constraints (15) determine that the inverters can be only placed at generation points. Constraints (16) and 17establish the placing of electricity consumption meters at the demand points fed by a microgrid.…”

“…Most of them are focused exclusively on the definition of the best combination of energy resources [12][13][14][15] but not on the distribution grid design. Others consider both problems although all the points must be connected to one only grid [16][17][18]. There are few references that deal with autonomous electrification systems designs using hybrid systems and microgrids or individual systems at the same time [11,19,20].…”

A procedure for distribution system planning of a large-scale agricultural project

“…The well known overall distribution system reliability indices SAIFI, SAIDI, and CAIDI are modified to suite this application, by replacing the number of customers with the number of served load points weighted by a multiplier of the load demand at each point as per Eqs. (13)(14)(15). …”

“…Rural distribution system planning was also investigated in [14][15][16]. The system is generally characterized by a sparsely populated service area with a mix of commercial, agricultural, and residential customers who are normally served by overhead radial distribution networks that are usually fed from a single unit substation with no back-up in the case of component outages.…”

Procediments heurístics de disseny de sistemes d'electrificació rural amb energies renovables

“…La majoria d'elles estan exclusivament focalitzades en la definició de la millor combinació de recursos d'energia [Georgopoulou et al, 1997;Luna-Rubio et al, 2012;Henao et al, 2012;Rojas-Zerpa & Yusta, 2014] però no pas en el disseny de la xarxa de distribució. Altres eines tenen en consideració tots dos problemes però en aquests casos tots els punts de consum han d'estar connectats a una única xarxa [Thirault et al, 2002;Keller et al, 2007;Michelon et al, 2008].…”