Optimal renewable integrated rural energy planning for sustainable energy development

Abstract

The renewable energy sources substitute traditional generation systems that can supply more reliable, environmentally friendly, and high-quality power. The off-grid electrification utilizing the integration of renewable energy systems is widely used to satisfy the energy need of remote rural areas. Due to intermittency in renewable production, energy storage balances the power demand against variable generation. The present study investigates the economic viability of a standalone hybrid energy system for a remote village in Uttarakhand (India). The suggested system consists of a Photovoltaic system, diesel generators, biogas generators, wind turbines, and batteries to meet the load demand of the area. The proposed microgrid utilized differential evolution (DE) to optimize the hybrid microgrid's sizing and economic analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed DE optimization results is compared with HOMER (Hybrid optimization of multi-energy resources), PSO (particle swarm optimization), and GA (Genetic algorithm). In addition, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the cost of energy for varying sensory inputs. The results indicate that DE can optimally size the system compared to its counterpart, HOMER, PSO, and GA. The decrement of 3.34%, 5.5%, and 7 % are achieved respectively in the total net present cost of the optimal configuration. However, it has been established that the suggested system is a more cost-effective and feasible system for rural area electrification.