Optimal Hybrid Renewable Energy System for Remote Area

Abstract

As in 2018, there are still 1.3 billion people been living without the access to electricity. It is critical to have a system that can cater the supply need for these rural areas with cost-effectiveness and reliability with respect to environmental issues such as low C02 emission that is one of the highest contribute to global warming. Although, micro-grid has always been the most reliable system for supplying electrical power, but considering the remoteness of these rural areas, extending micro-grid will remarkably be very expensive for construction materials, towers and transmission lines and impractical due to geographical build of these remote areas. Furthermore, installing power generations using only diesel generator is also prohibitive due to high cost of diesel and also transportation of this fuel. Due to these problems, renewable energy system has become one of the favorite options to replace the currents system. This paper proposes supplying electricity for indigenous people village in Peninsular Malaysia, using Hybrid Renewable Energy System. Combination of photovoltaic together with diesel generator and battery is crucial to have a system that is reliable and infrequent maintenance due to regular replacement and repair will be a hassle. Renewable energy system such as photovoltaic (PV) alone will not be reliable enough as if when the is no sunlight available there will not be any electricity produce. Therefore, combination of PV system with other renewable energy will make the system more reliable so that the system does not depend on one energy source. Thus, Hybrid Renewable Energy System is the most suitable system for rural area electrification. Lastly, for techno-economic analysis for the hybrid system HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable) software was used. The result includes, CO2 emission, cost of hybrid system, fuel saving and the optimal system configuration.