Abstract
This paper presents a feasibility and sensitivity analysis of renewable energy-based off-grid and grid-connected microgrids by investigating the potentials of wind and solar energy at different areas, namely, Kuakata, Sitakunda, Magnama, Dinajpur and Rangpur in Bangladesh - a country that experiences a tropical climate. A specialized neural network algorithm has been employed to track the wind speed and solar irradiance all year round in two salient regions and the promising results have been analyzed for making the decision whether the data are reliable for forecasting or not. Four different types of models including PV-Grid, Wind-Grid, Wind-PV-Grid, and off-grid hybrid renewables are designed using the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER Pro) software. By considering the key factors: net present cost, cost of energy, renewable fraction, local load demand, availability of renewable energy resources, system economics and greenhouse gas emissions, the optimal hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) configurations (Wind/PV/Grid/Battery) for the mentioned regions are determined. Various sensitivity and optimization variables, such as RE resources, local load demand, grid energy price, nominal discount rate, the life-time of wind turbine, the capacity of wind turbine, PV arrays, converter, and battery are used to make the decision. Detailed sensitivity analyses are performed to investigate how the optimal system configurations change with a tiny variation in input variables and results show output results are more sensitive on the variations in long-term average wind speed and solar irradiance, nominal discount rate, and the lifetime of wind turbines than the other inputs which is definitely a vital finding of this investigation. Finally, considering several decision making factors, a detailed feasibility chart is presented for two distinct nominal discount rates, i.e., 9% and 10%, which depicts the economically viable renewable energy based plant size in the mentioned regions. Although the crux of this paper is based on providing low-cost electricity to people living in rural areas of Bangladesh, our propositions carry with them certain concomitant benefits, not least of which are environmental and social benefits.
Highlights
Every sector of the current world is highly dependent on energy, and about 80% of the total energy comes from fossil fuels and nuclear energy which are responsible for global warming [1]
Different values of solar irradiance and wind speed are considered as the sensitivity variables which definitely help to select the optimum system configuration
For fixed system configuration i.e. W-PV-G system, sensitivity analysis with six uncertain input variables demonstrate how sensitive the total net present cost (NPC) is to each type of uncertain variables
Summary
Every sector of the current world is highly dependent on energy, and about 80% of the total energy comes from fossil fuels and nuclear energy which are responsible for global warming [1]. As renewable energy (RE)-based hybrid systems, such as wind and solar photovoltaic (PV), have potential benefits compared to a conventional system, a huge amount of research and studies have been carried out on them. Three different types of configurations have been analyzed and a comparative result based on the cost of energy (COE) and CO2 emission has reported that a hybrid PV-diesel-battery system is more cost-effective than the other two models such as PV–diesel without storage, and diesel-only [4]. By using HOMER and LINGO software, authors have studied and analyzed off-grid configurations for electrifying seven villages in the Almora district of India where, four different types of models have been considered with integrating biomass, hydro, solar, and wind energy sources and the optimum results have been worked out [9]. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the renewable energy scenario in Bangladesh; modeling parameters are presented in section 3; section 4 includes a description of the software tools that are employed, section 5 presents input parameters which are used for simulation; section 6 depicts the simulation results under various conditions; sections 7 and 8 delineate the economic and ancillary benefits of renewable energy and section 9 concludes the paper with pointers for future research directions
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