Optimal control application in a hydrokinetic-battery power generation on seasonal river for energy-enabler for remote rural communities: Case of Zambia

The paper presents a rural community hydrokinetic power plant model under optimal energy management control. A storage system is proposed on the demand side to provide reliability and easier system expansion with other distributed energy sources. More than half of the population in Sub-Saharan African countries have no access to electricity despite having of plenty of running rivers. The model's performance index is to harness more of the river energy while prolonging the life of the battery storage. Unlike solar energy that is only available during the daytime, hydrokinetic energy is available throughout the day. This model's optimal control strategy is a mixed integer linear problem solved in Matlab SCIP. A case study was done and the results show huge potential for providing energy as enabler to rural communities. A total of 21.406kWh/day energy generation was achieved, energy that would have been lost in river currents. This clean energy can be used for refrigeration of people's farm produce and increase access to information/communication, which would eventually improve market intelligence. This model can be applied in powering remote military sensors, a drone-charging station and observatory centers as well.