A Methodology to Develop Sustainable Electricity for Small Rural Communities: Supply System Design for Critical Load Matching

摘要

Renewable energy integration into diesel generation systems for remote rural communities is a rapidly growing energy engineering field. Fuel supply issues are becoming more common and the disruption, instability and panic caused by fuel shortages results in inefficient and unreliable power supplies for remote rural communities. This work explains an energy engineering approach for providing renewable energy development, supply security, cost and sustainability objectives. The approach involves adapting proven energy engineering techniques including energy auditing, energy system modelling with basic cost analysis and demand side management. The novel aspect of this research is development of critical load engineering in the system design, and informing this with assessment of essentiality of energy services during the audit phase. This approach is motivated by experiences with previous fuel shortages and long term sustainability policy drivers. The methodology uses the most essential electric loads as the requirement for sizing the renewable energy capacity in the hybrid system. This approach is revolutionary as communication with the customers about availability and the need to shed non-essential loads both helps to meet cost and security requirements, and helps to reduce panic and uncertainty when fuel supply issues arise. A detailed case study was performed for a remote island in the republic of Maldives, with a peak load of 48 kW and average daily consumption of 890 kWh. In this research, the time series modelling was conducted for power generation with various technology combinations such as wind, solar photovoltaic, diesel generators and battery banks for storage. Optimisation tool HOMER for power generation was used for simulation, optimisation and sensitivity in designing basic power systems. The main conclusion drawn from the research is that in many rural small communities in developing countries there exist great opportunities for better exploitation of renewable energy based electric power systems now and in the future.