Electrification of Remote Clinics by Photovoltaic – Hydrogen Fuel Cell System

Abstract

Palestinian health clinics in remote areas suffer mostly from lack of electric networks due to Israeli restrictions and lack of infrastructure fund from National Authorities. Most of these areas are far from the main medium voltage transmission lines, which makes it unfeasible to connect them with the main electric power grids. Therefore, renewable energy sources especially as solar and bio-waste can represent a more clean, reliable and feasible solution. Typical energy consumption pattern of a small health clinic is illustrated. Modeling of a proposed PV-Fuel Cell system will be provided. Experimental results obtained from a reduced scale model, built in the lab to give insight into the system technical details, will be presented. Fuel availability and clean energy production by fuel cell, giving its chemical reactions occurring inside the cell as well as production of electricity for unlimited time, are of the main system topics in this paper. The paper provides also a power management strategy for solar and fuel cell system to cover the power demands of a typical small clinic in rural areas of Palestine. The proposed control strategy is based on a logic-based method that considers the status of power supply sources and the load demands to combine and switch in between giving priority to the more stable source. In addition, experimental results for a scaled system built in the lab are presented. Finally, a financial comparison between using storage batteries and fuel cells for electrification of rural clinics is discussed in this paper. It was found that using of fuel cells is economically more feasible.