Stand alone hybrid power system design for rural electrification in Ethiopia

This paper presents the development of an effective approach of design, simulation and analysis of stand-alone hybrid renewable energy resources for typical rural village in remote area situated in SNNPR region of Ethiopia. It emphasizes the renewable hybrid power system to obtain a reliable autonomous system with the optimization of components size and Levelized Cost of Energy. The main power of the hybrid system comes from the photovoltaic panel batteries / inverter system, while the diesel generator is used as backup units. The optimization software used for this paper is HOMER. HOMER is design software that determines the optimal architecture and control strategy of the hybrid system. Critical decision variables like the size of the PV array, size and number of battery string, inverter, size of diesel Generator, dispatch strategy, are given weight in the optimization process. Wind speed and solar radiation data have been taken from NASA's meteorological department. A remote village with energy consumption of 279 kWh/day and 64 kW peak power demand was considered. The simulation results indicate that the proposed hybrid system would be a feasible solution for distributed generation of electric power for stand-alone applications at remote village with 200 households with average of five family members per household. An innovative approach of determining rural electric load for remote village which does not have electric access has been proposed