Development of stand-alone green hybrid system for rural areas

Despite the tremendous efforts exhibited by various utilities around the world during the past few years, there are still exceedingly many remote regions unreached by the electrical grid. For those regions, the enormous available potential of renewable energy resources is believed to be useful for the development of a stand-alone power supply system. This paper presents the modeling of a stand-alone hybrid system for the remote area of Ethiopia. A comparison of the economic performance of various scenarios of a stand-alone photovoltaic (PV)-wind hybrid system, with battery storage and diesel as a backup for electrifying remote rural areas, is presented. Therefore, a practical example, Kutur village of Awlio kebele of the Axum district, Ethiopia (which is 30 km away from the closest national grid) is considered for this research. Two electric load scenarios are estimated by considering the set of incandescent and efficient lamps for lighting for the 120 existing households. The above-mentioned solar radiation and wind speed are then used as an input to simulate the hybrid set-up for the high and low load estimation using HOMER software. The simulation result shows that the net present costs (NPC) corresponding to the high and low load scenarios is $262,470 and $180,731, respectively. Besides, an essential load forecasting is performed to see the effect of the increase in electric demand of the community on the required investment to install a stand-alone hybrid set-up. The NPC after load forecasting is found to be more than three folds of the NPC required for the reference year. In both cases, the simulation results indicate that using a stand-alone PV-wind hybrid system with battery storage and a diesel generator as a backup for electrifying Kutur village is cost-effective and comparable against the cost required for electrifying the village by extending the grid.