Feasibility study and performance analysis of microgrid with 100% hybrid renewables for a real agricultural irrigation application

Abstract

Recently, wide attention has been paid to the techno-economic viability for electrifying rural and remote areas while less awareness for agricultural irrigation pumps is given. Diesel generators are still utilized for agricultural facilities, causing ecological issues and energy price growth. In this paper, an integrative techno-economic design optimization framework for adequate planning of fully renewable energy system including photovoltaic units, wind turbines and batteries fed a real case-study of an agricultural load of 240 kWh/day in Al-Sadat city, Egypt, is proposed using HOMER Pro. The project site is favorably chosen since Egypt holds great potential for renewables; manipulating these resources becomes crucial for achieving national sustainability as per Egypt 2030 vision. The feasibility and performance of the proposed energy system are evaluated and analyzed regarding its technical and economic dimensions and compared with four different energy alternatives, including the existing real system and the standalone diesel system, for fair comparisons. The design optimization is followed by parametric and reliability analyses to uncover the impacts of uncertainty in seven key input parameters and power generation shortage on optimal economic behavior. The achieved outcomes reveal that the fully renewable solar/wind/batteries/converter system is of optimal behaviours over other alternatives to fulfil the load demand. The proposed system acquires the minimum net present cost ($194,017) and cost of energy (0.119 $/kWh) and efficiently attains a negligible ratio in both capacity shortage and unserved load with only 0.098%. Besides, a productive amount of surplus energy (61.7%) is achieved for further deferable loads supplying. Moreover, the parametric analysis proves the great reliance of system cost on the uncertainty of discount rate, project lifetime and components’ capital costs while the uncertainty in renewable resources has a slight impact on the system performance. In addition, the reliability analysis indicates that a small and tolerable loss of power supply by 2% results in considerable financial benefits while optimizing the microgrid design. The study is expected to raise the awareness of exploiting renewable energy in Egypt and provide a valuable proposal for replacing the existing energy system of the addressed case-study.