Decision making approach for assessing the suitable hybrid renewable energy based microgrid system for rural electrification in India

Abstract

In the present work, a decision-making framework in the form of TOmada de Decisao Interativa Multicriterio (TODIM) has been employed to identify the best microgrid scenario for a given location. The study has considered a total of eight microgrid scenarios that have been appraised with due consideration to economic and environmental metrics. Net project cost and cost of energy have been considered as the economic metrics while renewable energy fraction and greenhouse gas emissions as environmental metrics. HOMER has been used to carry out the optimization analysis and hence the aforementioned metrics. TODIM methodology is then applied to rank the considered microgrid scenarios. An inclusive evaluation shows that the hybrid renewable energy based microgrid system encompassing photovoltaic (PV), diesel generator (DiG), battery (BAT), fuel cell (FC), wind turbine (WT) and convertor (CONV) turns out to be the best scenario for the considered area.