A feasibility study on microgrid for various Islands in Australia

Abstract

Isolated and small electricity consumption locations such as Islands are not providing enough foundation for grid extensions to deliver electricity to the localities. Therefore, most of the Islands are using stand-alone generators to deliver power to the consumers. However, this not only increases the cost of energy generation but also increases the threat of global warming and makes them susceptible to natural disasters and reliability. The increasing awareness of global warming, reliability and security has seen the emphasis on microgrid facilities with distributed energy resources. Therefore, this study will demonstrate the feasibility of implementing microgrid systems using hybrid power systems (HPS) on various Australian Island. HPS model will be developed for Christmas Island (35.8333OS, 137.2500OE) and Kangaroo Island (10.4833OS, 105.6333OE) with the help of hybrid optimisation model for electric renewable (HOMER). Feasibility study has been conducted considering both environmental and economical evaluations, in which the environmental indicators are the emissions and renewable energy generation fraction (RF) and the economical evaluation is calculated through the total net present cost (NPC) and cost of energy (COE). The results has shown that the HPS has benefits of cost savings as seen in the NPC and COE evaluations and also reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions significantly.