Analysis of grid/solar photovoltaic power generation for improved village energy supply: A case of Ikose in Oyo State Nigeria

Abstract

Energy crisis is one of the major challenges confronting African countries. Nigeria is one of the countries having a high energy deficit in Africa with rural areas being at the receiving end. Hence, people in several locations of the country depend largely on fossil fuels for their energy generation due to the energy supply problem being experienced in the country. Fossil fuel-based energy generation is highly environmentally-unfriendly hence, the use of renewable energy system is adopted as a viable alternative to solve the energy crisis. This work first reviews the energy status in rural Nigeria to describe the situation and the available energy resources. Three different energy scenarios – Grid only, PV only and the PV-Grid configurations were designed and simulated using the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) tool for a village in Oyo state, Nigeria. The design of the energy systems is based on technical and economic analyses, which provide the opportunity to compare the performances of the different scenarios. The study uses the monthly grid purchase (MGP), excess electrical production (EEP), and unmet electric load (UEL), net present cost (NPC), Levelized cost of energy (LCOE), annual operating cost (OC) and the salvage value (SV) for the comparison. The simulation results demonstrated that the PV-Grid system is best option for the village with the highest MGP, EEP, and UEL of about 34, 24, and 0.7 kW, respectively. The corresponding economic implications for the PV-grid configuration are NPC, LCOE, OC, and SV values of 73388.77, 0.1904, 1957.64, and 2,173.55 USD. The sensitivity analysis result revealed that the grid only and PV-grid are not as affected by a change in temperature compared to the PV only whose energy production, and EEP values decrease with an increase in temperature and the UEL parameter increases with an increase in the surrounding temperature.