DEVELOPMENT OF COST EFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR HARNESSING RENEWABLE ENERGY IN REMOTE AREA

Abstract

Energy is the basic human need and critical input to the socio economic development of the country. Supply of reliable and quality power at reasonable rate is essential for overall development of a nation. The rural areas are at disadvantageous state so far its availability to them is concerned. With the realization of depleting fossil fuels and prospects of severe adverse impact of its use has led the scientists, engineers and planners to look for alternate energy resources, which are not only environmentally friendly but sustainable also. Numerous such energy sources are identified. They are found to be fairly evenly distributed and available almost free. This makes them perfect source for fulfillment of energy needs of rural masses. But some of the problems associated in harnessing them are their low density, site specific availability, costly to transport and variation over time. The dilute availability requires costly energy conversion system to harness while variations in availability over time make: them'.unreliable. All these aspects require a careful consideration in design of integration .of.conversion systems to attain desire, level of reliability and cost. In this context the utilization --of: resources efficiently plays an .important role. The efficient utilization of resources would result in a system which will have the least losses. In the dissertation report a generalized optimization model for finding optimal combination -of Integrated Renewable Energy System (IRES) is developed to harness the. renewable, energy sources in a remote area. This model is applicable to any rural village. A- goal programming method to achieve minimum cost and maximum efficiency in utilization of available resources to meet the various loads has been devised -which will result in an optimal sizing of these energy conversion systems. The aforesaid method is applied to a village selected for study. Cooking, lighting and mechanical energy requirements of the village are estimated along with the available renewable;.: resources and the method is applied to size the renewable energy conversion, systems (RECS).