Standalone photovoltaic and battery microgrid design for rural areas

Abstract

The remote location and many islands in Africa are experiencing a big power shortage and blackouts and they greatly necessitate electric power from standalone photovoltaic microgri­d. In Rwanda, off-grid solar systems are at their infancy level and their affordability for the rural population requires thorough support and incentives. In this process, the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has set a program to subsidize the cost of the system in a rural household power access projects suit to their socio-economic metric known as ‘Ubudehe’ which would determine the required financial support from other poverty reduction programs in a country. The design of a standalone photovoltaic microgrid is aimed to find the cheapest way to go for either a single rural house or a group of 200 rural houses with similar load demand as a long-term solution to their local energy challenges. The models resulted in a Levelized cost of energy, least cost of energy (LCOE) of 1.51US$/kWh for a single home while the LCOE for the group of houses load equals 1.45US$/kWh. The net present cost (NPC) for a single home and multi-user load are respectively equal to 5,625US$ and 1,079,210US$. These results conclude the efficacy of the group sharing load demand model design to provide green energy solutions to the mid-and low-income rural population in Rwanda.