A New Toolkit for Energy Planning for Isolated Microgrids

Abstract

Rural areas in various locations are facing electricity shortages and are compelled to heavily rely on non-renewable and ecologically harmful fossil fuels as their primary source of energy. To address this issue, microgrids were proposed as a solution to provide energy to these areas. An IEEE working group, the SESDC Working Group, was established to investigate the feasibility of implementing isolated microgrids as solutions in these communities. However, it has been identified that a proper software tool for microgrid planning is needed to accurately analyze the optimal microgrid configuration. Thus, a user-friendly and secure web-based system for microgrid planning was proposed. This tool was developed using the Django web development framework and Python programming language. It was then validated with users to ensure that the data entered is calculated correctly and produced the expected results.

Keywords

• Django web development framework
• economic toolkit
• energy access
• microgrid planning
• model-view-controller
• prefeasibility analysis