DESIGN OF SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC-DIESEL HYBRID SYSTEM FOR A REMOTE AREA

Abstract

Energy is a crucial input in the economic, social and industrial development of the country. The growth of world population coupled with the improved standard of living has increased the energy consumption considerably by the turn of 21st century. These areas specifically hilly, forest and tribal area, islands, in remote due to their varied geographic and demographic locations and generally have low load potential, low load factor and inaccessibility of national grid thereby making them unable to connect to the grid due to the involvement of heavy capital investment and therefore are also not expected to have power in the long run. In order to energize such areas the renewable energy sources have been found to be most reliable, economic, ecofriendly and quickly installable as compared to conventional energy sources. The renewable energy sources like solar, wind, biomass, Shp, tidal etc the main sources of renewable/green power which can be used to electrify such areas in most appropriate and economic way. Out of these sources, SPV is considered reliable, pollution free and convenient power generation system. The main constraint to implement the SPV system is its high cost of energy as well as have limited potential and limit its use large such power generation. The limitations & constraints of SPV power can be improved by using different combinations either of among renewable energy sources i. e. integrated renewable energy system or such as system like SPV-Biomass, SPV-diesel & SPV-Wind-diesel or conventional energy e. g. diesel engine generator system known as hybrid. Among the above combinations, a hybrid system is selected depending upon their energy resources availability, demographic data and load/consumption pattern. The study area in Orissa state, the SPV-hybrid energy system has been promising prospects for power generation. All the rural households in remote area are ii without access to grid electricity and as per recent Rural Electrification Bills 2003, the Govt. of India has fixed a target of electrifying all such areas by renewable electricity by 2012. The present study has been carried out to design a SPV-Diesel hybrid system for providing sustained power to a typical remote area in Kendrapara district of Orissa state. On the basis of energy resources data & load pattern of the area, HOMER (version-2.09) computer software has been used to optimization the SPV-hybrid system and it was found that the system design will consist of 70 % of SPV & 30% of DG generation with peak power of 160 kW. Accordingly, the system has been designed & unit cost of energy be calculated including cost of energy of all SPV & all DG power. It was also found that the DG-set is not suitable to electrify the selected remote area in comparison to SPV stand-alone system even if the unit cost of energy of former is very less.