Hybrid Electricity Generation for Village Electrification in Papua New Guinea (PNG) – A Case Study

摘要

Electricity access was available to ~21% of the total population in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the year 2014. Major contribution to this was from the urban population. Villages in PNG are remotely located with low population which makes them unattractive for interconnection with the main grid (higher cost and low revenues). Village electrification (VE) is defined as the “process by which access to electricity is provided to households or villages located in the isolated or remote areas of a countryâ€. Thus, for electricity access electricity supply infrastructure can even be established locally without connecting to the main grid (off-grid). Such off-grid system can supply rural consumers with electricity generated from available local resources like hydro, solar or biomass. To ensure reliability and low cost of generation, fossil fuel generation can be used in tandem with these resources (hybrid generation). This paper describes the case study undertaken to study optimum solutions for rural electrification of (PNG) considering various options for electrification of villages. As a first step, peak demand and energy consumption was estimated for Village Centers (VC) with consideration of varied types of load like residential, commercial, health clinic, community facilities and water treatment plants with distinct load pattern. In the second step, techno-economic evaluation of the technology options for meeting the electricity requirement of VC namely Solar PV (SPV), Micro Hydro (MH), Diesel Generator (DG), hybrid solutions combining renewable and diesel. This includes dispatch simulations using ‘Homer Pro’ software and computation of levelized cost of electricity for each of the options.