Abstract
The demand for electricity in remote rural areas is a major obstacle to their development. The extension of the grid network to remote rural areas has been identified as a difficult topography for complex constructions and enormous investments. The development of off-grid renewable energy generation technologies offers the opportunity for tackling these challenges. This study provides a techno-economic feasibility analysis of an off-grid hybrid renewable energy system for a rural village of district Kech, Balochistan, Pakistan. The proposed hybrid system integrates the different combinations of the wind turbine, solar PV modules, and battery backups to meet the required electric load demand. The hybrid system is modeled and optimized through a powerful simulation software Hybrid Optimized Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER-Pro). The optimized configuration of the hybrid system consists of wind turbines (12kW), solar PV (103kW), 224 lead-acid batteries (72.4Ah each), and 29.1 kW converters. The simulation results show that the proposed system can meet the power requirements of 197.74kWh/day primary demand load with 27.87kW peak load. This system configuration has the Net Present Cost (NPC) of $127,345 and Cost of Energy (COE) of 0.137$/kWh with a 100% renewable fraction. Furthermore, the results of the present study are compared with the literature and have resulted in a cost-effective hybrid renewable energy system with a low COE.
Highlights
Energy is the main pillar of the social and economic stability of a country
When the power produced from the wind turbine and solar PV arrays are not enough for the demand load to supply in cases such as low wind speed or solar radiations, the charged batteries work to Different configurations with different operating systems were simulated by calculating the energy according to the demand and supply of every time step of the year
The optimum hybrid energy system has the lowest Net Present Cost (NPC) as shown in Table 8 below
Summary
Energy is the main pillar of the social and economic stability of a country. Due to modern living standards, industrialization, and population growth, the current energy demand is gradually increasing day by day [1]. According to research done by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), states that around 2 billion of the population globally do not have access to grid electricity, the majority of them live in rural remote areas of developed and underdeveloping countries. Installation and supply of grid electricity are financially impracticable or practically not feasible for such specific sparsely populated remote areas [2]. People of these rural areas have several electricity interruptions, and most of them still have no access to electricity. The electrification of remote areas is a vital need for developing these areas to achieve economic growth, eradicate poverty, and improve livelihoods. Conventional methods are used to supply electricity to these areas such as utility grid extension and diesel generators
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