Techno-economic investigation of an environmentally friendly small-scale solar tracker-based PV/wind/Battery hybrid system for off-grid rural electrification in the mount bamboutos, Cameroon

Abstract

The present work demonstrates the techno-economic analysis of an environmentally friendly small-scale PV/Wind/Battery hybrid system for off-grid rural electrification in the city of Mbouda. The major contributions of this work are fourfold: (i) PV/Wind/Battery hybrid system is proposed for the very first time in this locality; (ii) six PV tracking techniques namely: horizontal axis (monthly adjustment), horizontal axis (weekly adjustment), horizontal axis (daily adjustment), horizontal axis (continuous adjustment), vertical axis (continuous adjustment) and dual-axis tracker are implemented in the present hybrid system; (iii) the impact of ambient air temperature on the PV power production is evaluated; (iv) the influence of three different hub heights (17 m, 50 m, 150 m) on the wind turbine power output is investigated. The electric load for the basic needs of a community of 152 consumers (households, hospitals, schools, businesses) such as; lighting, radio, television, phone charger, water heater, electric iron, and laptop, is estimated. HOMER Pro is used for the optimization and sensitivity analysis of the proposed hybrid system. The solutions obtained in the present work showed that compared to the PV power generated by fixed solar panels, the dual-axis solar tracker system was the system that offered the maximum power production (about 7.02%–30.73% more power). In addition, compared to the PV penetration of fixed solar panels, the dual solar tracker also offered the maximum PV penetration (about 7.64%–31.50% more PV penetration). It was also concluded that increasing the hub height (from 17 m to 150 m), significantly increased the wind power generation and penetration. Concerning the economic aspect of the work, it was noticed that the dual-axis solar tracking system presented the lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and net present cost (NPC) when compared with the other aforementioned solar tracking systems. The results also indicated that taking into account the ambient air temperature, impacted the PV and wind power productions. The analysis of emissions allowed us to confirm that the system was environmentally friendly since no greenhouse gas was produced.