Chapter 9 - Techno-economic comparative assessment of an off-grid hybrid renewable energy system for electrification of remote area

Abstract

Nowadays, the demand for renewable energy is increased for electrical power generation with conventional sources. Renewable energy resources are available free of cost, as pollution-free, and abundantly available in the environment. While designing renewable hybrid systems, there are so many challenges, such as the issue of continuous power supply to the load, storage issues, and sizing of the substation. All these issue are addressed in this chapter using the Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable software. An off-grid hybrid renewable energy system is proposed with photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine (WT), biomass, and backup protection unit to electrify the remote location where utility supply is not available. The off-grid hybrid system design location has great potential of solar irradiation 5.19kWh/day, wind speed 4.51m/s, and biomass resource production 0.13tonnes/day. The off-grid hybrid system prefeasibility analysis is based on economic, technical, and emission parameters. In this chapter, six different configurations of the hybrid renewable system are considered to evaluate the feasibility and was found that PV/WT/biomass/generator/battery hybrid system is more optimal solution among all six configurations. This configuration has the lowest levelized cost of energy ($0.1914), less initial cost ($99,889.45), and operating cost ($3415) of the hybrid system. Among all off-grid system, PV/WT/biomass/generator/battery produces very less emission and a high renewable fraction of 86.5% as compared to other configurations.