Feasibility Assessment of Rural Hybrid Microgrid Using Canal-Based Microhydel Resources: A Case Study of Renala Khurd Pakistan

Water canal networks that are widely used for irrigation are an equally good source of micropower generation to be fed to the nearby areas. A practical example of such a system is the micro-hydro generation at Renala Khurd Pakistan integrated with the national grid known as hydro–grid configuration. Apart from the rare Renala Khurd hydro generation example, solar photovoltaic generation integrated with a mainstream network, i.e., solar PV-Grid configuration, is widely used. The integrated operation of combinations of primary distributed generation sources has different operational attributes in terms of economics and reliability that are needed to be quantified before installation. So far, various combinations of primary distributed generation sources have been simulated and their accumulative impact on project economics and reliability have been reported. A detailed economic and reliability assessment of various configurations is needed for sustainable and cost-effective configuration selection. This study proposes a trigeneration combination of solar–hydro–grid with an optimal sizing scheme to reduce the solar system sizing and grid operational cost. A genetic algorithm based optimal sizing formulation is developed using fixed hydro and variable solar and grid systems with a number of pre-defined constraints. The hydro–grid, solar–grid, and grid–hydro–solar configurations are simulated in HOMER Pro software to analyze the economic impact, and to undertake reliability assessments under various configurations of the project. Finally, optimal values of the genetic algorithm are provided to the HOMER Pro software search space for simulating the grid–hydro–solar configuration. It was revealed that the net present cost (NPC) of hydro-to-grid configuration was 23% lower than the grid–hydro–solar configuration, whereas the NPC of grid–hydro–solar without optimal sizing was 40% lower than the solar–grid configuration, and the NPC of grid–solar–hydro with the genetic algorithm was 36% lower than the hydro–grid configuration, 50.90% lower than solar–grid–hydro without the genetic algorithm, and 17.1% lower than the grid–solar configuration, thus proving utilization of trigeneration sources integration to be a feasible solution for areas where canal hydropower is available