Article

Survey Based Characterisation of Energy Services for Improved Design and Operation of Standalone Microgrids

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Abstract

Microgrids for rural electrification are expected to play a key role in achieving global energy access goals. However, the high cost of stand-alone microgrids intended to serve generally poor communities remains a key barrier to their deployment, while design and operation is challenging, given generally low diversity of loads and generators, and often high penetrations of variable renewable generation. Current practices for providing electricity access still often focus on the supply side with an emphasis on ensuring the reliability, affordability and security of electricity supply to meet user demand. This supply focus misses some key opportunities on the demand-side for providing low cost and reliable energy service delivery. In particular, rural communities may place very different relative values on various energy services, while there may be considerable flexibility in terms of when some of these energy services are delivered; due to inherent energy storage in the end-use equipment, or user willingness to shift the energy service itself. This paper presents a novel characterisation framework for energy services based on their relative flexibility and consumer prioritisation. Detailed survey data from 154 households across five microgrid sites in Nepal is used to test this framework, and assess the potential insights that it can provide for microgrid designers and operators seeking to reduce costs and improve reliability when serving poor rural communities. The five microgrids represent very different energy services and microgrid technology contexts, yet all would appear to have demand-side management opportunities that can trade-off cost and reliability and prioritise loads according to user preferences.

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... Taking the case of Nepal, more than 55 MW of electricity has been produced from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) like mini/micro-hydropower plants (MHP), solar and wind energy, which fulfils the electrical demand of 3.6 million households [10]. However, different MGs in Nepal face issues on availability, as the average availability of electricity varies from eight hours in a day in minimum for the solar/wind MGs, and up to 23 hours of supply for the Micro Hydropower Plant (MHP) [11]. This indicates a deficit of supply in these rural MGs. ...
... This indicates a deficit of supply in these rural MGs. Literature shows that researches have been conducted for the design of the reliable system and to reduce the cost through various means like interconnection of MGs [12], optimization of generation technology [7,[13][14][15], finding the optimal way to share surplus energy between gridlines [7], load management [6,11]. However, these researches only focus on managing energy from the generation side [16,17]. ...
... To shift, shed or adjust the consumption, understanding these loads becomes very important. Studies tend to perform the load classification based on user preference, energy demand, and flexibility [6,11]. As loads are the appliances being used in each household, researchers classified the appliances as static and dynamic [25], shed-able and unshed-able [6], critical and uncritical [26], programmable and dimmable load [2], and so on based on their power consumption and behaviour of their use. ...
Article
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Microgrid (MG) is one of the practical and best concepts to provide energy access to rural communities, where electric grid extension is not techno-economically feasible. Since the trend of load consumption is not uniform with a low load factor in a rural area, the required rating of the system becomes very high. Similarly, the generation is fixed for these MGs, whereas the load increases continuously over time. Such a system faces supply deficit issues triggering a high number of interruptions that may cause frequent blackouts. Hence, rolling blackout and load clipping techniques are preferred during the peak load period in most of the rural MGs. These issues lead to an unreliable power supply and low satisfaction level of the user. This paper presents the load prioritization technique to guarantee the continuous supply for the essential loads within the rural community. A day-ahead energy allocation technique is mathematically formulated and optimized to maximize the total hours of energy served. This technique maximized the hours of energy served to the load with higher priority followed by the load with lower priorities. From this study, it is found that the proposed strategy helps to improve the hours of energy served in the overall system, by improving the state of charge (SoC) level of the battery system. The result shows that the user satisfaction level has been improved by 5% through 100% of continuity for the essential loads.
... In the present context, the continuous availability of energy and its quality is a major concern. Several studies [9,10], presented the survey results on how the sources connected to the grid affect the system reliability. It was shown that the RES have low availability and can cause performance fluctuation because of their periodic and unpredictable nature [11,12]. ...
... However, a question arises on the prioritization of the appliances and its basis. Shakya et al. [9], present a framework on prioritization of load in rural household based on user preference and storability of the load. However, various technical measures like reliability, stability and protection issues are to be considered during the implementation at the real site. ...
... The sources are connected so that the solar generation holds higher priority and battery are used as a backup. To test the system in realistic condition, the sample for the demand of a scale-downed load at the rural community has been taken, and the loads are divided into three categories depending upon their level of necessity as in [9]. These loads are provided with different level of priorities in the power system. ...
Article
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This paper discusses the current state of DC distribution system, how it can be beneficial to isolate solar-based Micro-Grid (MG) system in a rural area, and how the priority-based approach can help the MGs to operate in cost-effective and reliable ways. DC distribution system holds many advantages over AC systems in such area, where the load demand is not so high and the electricity supply through grid extension is not feasible. Direct load control-based approach can ensure a continuous supply of power to the loads with various priorities. In this paper, an experimental analysis of the DC MGs has been presented with the help of priority based algorithms. A cost-effective SCADA system is developed to interface with the remaining parts of the system, so that the MGs can be monitor and control to get the desired performance. The main objective of this study is to identify a cost-effective and practical energy management system for the rural area, where expensive and advanced technology is not suitable. From this study, it is concluded that the proposed combination of algorithm and SCADA system increase the system's reliability and power consistency significantly.
... Multiple pieces of research tend to classify the load to improve user satisfaction for the implemented demand response. Researchers tend to perform classification of the load based on user preference, energy demand, and their use in flexibility [13,16]. A study [17], classifies the load based on their dependency on time, it discussed two different classes considering static and dynamic behaviours to time. ...
... The author classifies the appliances in the household based on their flexibility to use. Such load demand requires continuous and instantaneous power with flexibility is addressed as critical load and appliances with somewhat controllable and schedulable T A B L E 1 Availability and reliability of isolated microgrid of Nepal [13]. appliances as uncritical load, which further uses priority arbitration allowing room for discrimination in the satisfaction within the load class. ...
Article
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A novel control mechanism is presented for rural microgrids, standing out in the current literature with its advanced approach to load prioritisation and energy allocation. The system's main goal is to maximise energy supply to essential loads while effectively managing available resources. Distinct from traditional methods, this mechanism dynamically classifies loads according to user‐defined priorities, adjustable based on the control system's computational power and complexity. A critical feature is the utilisation of the Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) algorithm to optimise demand side management (DSM). This innovative approach leverages day‐ahead load and generation forecasts to ensure optimal energy distribution across load levels, maintaining continuous power supply to high‐priority loads and reducing blackout risks due to generation and load fluctuations. Analyses under stochastic scenarios demonstrate the robustness of the control action, with percentile‐based day‐ahead forecasting allowing for adaptation to significant variations in renewable energy generation patterns. The implementation results are significant, maintaining 100% supply continuity to essential loads throughout the day, even with generation fluctuations up to ‐20%. This marks a considerable improvement in load satisfaction, increasing it from 83% to 96%. A significant advancement in microgrid control is contributed, providing an adaptive, user‐centric approach that enhances load management and energy distribution, and facilitates more resilient and efficient microgrid systems in the face of highly variable renewable energy sources (RESs).
... In the design phase, there was proactive planning for demand projections, while in the O&M phase, the community actively participated in matching demand to supply. For example, community participation was cited as instrumental in changing patterns of energy consumption [84] and avoiding overuse [25]. Over-consumption was mitigated by the early inclusion of the community [85][86][87]. ...
... Over-consumption was mitigated by the early inclusion of the community [85][86][87]. This was not an explicit goal set by the operators, but rather an aspect of the mini grid project for which community participation was found to be effective in practice [25,[84][85][86][87]. ...
Article
Mini grids are increasingly recognized as a solution for the 840 million people globally without access to electricity and for the additional millions of people poorly served by traditional grid infrastructure. Understanding the role and importance of community participation in mini grid inception, design, build, and operations and maintenance will be essential to sustainably achieving universal access. This review analyzes the literature on community participation in private mini grid projects: how community participation is defined, in which phases of the project it arises, and how it affects the project's sustainability. We find that community participation is almost universally invoked as essential to system sustainability. Community participation most often appears in the operations and maintenance phase, leading to a positive social sustainability. We compile best practices, such as initiating participation early, pursuing wide inclusion, investing in community technical capacity, and creating clear governance models. Finally, we provide a framework and accompanying survey tool to gather information on community participation in mini grid systems to attenuate literature gaps. Community participation in mini grid projects should be leveraged to accelerate universal electricity access and green economic recovery, but it must go beyond surface level customer acquisition.
... suitable solution to provide electricity [3]. However, there are numerous challenges in isolated energy system such as high-cost, poor reliability, weak power quality, low load factor, poor maintenance, weak institutional structure lack of proper monitoring and supervision etc. [4]- [6]. As the nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) is fluctuating and highly dependent on weather, the generated energy is also unpredictable, which can be addressed via the integration of storage devices or/ and by interconnecting multiple energy resources [7]- [9]. ...
... Whereas, in Baidi MG 5P Business Model namely flagship business model is implemented where a committee of five members (three from the private company and two from the community) is formed for complete maintenance and operation activities. Likewise, MGs of Nepal are owned by combination among community, cooperative, private company, rural market centre, governmental bodies for the upliftment of renewable energy and the governing body is formed by elected representatives of owners [4]. ...
Article
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Nepal is a Himalayan country with its 83% of its geography being composed of hills and mountains. Around 22% of the Nepalese population is not receiving electricity through the national power utility and is forced to identify alternative approaches to electrification. The Micro/Mini-Grid (MG) system is one of the promising approaches in terms of cost, reliability and performance for rural electrification, where electrification through national power utility is not techno-economically feasible. However, various issues must be identified and considered during the implementation of MGs in a rural community. In this paper, numerous technical, social and management issues are identified and discussed relating to the implementation and operation of reliable and stable MGs in the Himalayas. To our knowledge, this is the first scientific work that presents a comprehensive review of Himalayan MGs and their associated elements. This article reviews the available research articles, project documents, and Government reports on MG development, from which a clear roadmap is constructed. From the comprehensive study, it is observed that the existing MGs are not adequately designed for the specific area, considering the local resources and local information. Based on the identified issues, some practical and efficient recommendations have been made, so that future MG projects will address the possible problems during the design and implementation phase.
... The high cost of isolated microgrids remains an impediment to their implementation in poor communities [20]. In most scenarios, the main factor is the initial investment cost of the ESS. ...
Article
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By the year 2020, 90% of the population with access to electricity worldwide was surpassed. However, the reality is very different for many countries, especially for those on the African continent that had more than 572 million people without electricity service at the end of 2019. This work studies the implementation of an isolated microgrid activated with photovoltaic energy and energy storage in batteries under the case study of the community of Bigene, located in the African country of Guinea-Bissau. This type of project is a potential solution to the problem of access to energy, but as the cost of the energy storage system is typically very high, this work technically and economically addresses the effect of using absorbed glass material (AGM) and lithium batteries. A simulator was developed using TRNSYS software to analyze the operation of the microgrid under a defined annual demand profile for different types of users, and economic analysis was conducted considering a project lifetime of 25 years. The results showed no significant differences in the solar fraction of both types of batteries when the photovoltaic power was less than 600 kW, regardless of the capacity of the storage bank. The analysis of auxiliary power requirements showed that lithium technology leads to a lower consumption from 800 kW of PV capacity, and utilizing less than this capacity did not have a significant difference with AGM batteries. In this microgrid with a photovoltaic capacity of less than 700 kW and an energy storage of less than 2580 kWh, the type of storage technology, AGM or lithium, did not represent a considerable difference in the levelized cost of energy, indicating that AGM technology could be selected considering its low initial investment cost compared to lithium batteries.
... They later investigated the scheduling effects, forecast solar insolation variability, and battery degradation (Cho and Valenzuela, 2020)-.The recent studies from Nepal elaborated on the off-grid solutions for rural communities where much emphasis was put on the end-user load preference. Their paper contribution uses micro and mini-hydro and solar resources microgrids to feed the load based on the order of preference whereby Energy services are categorized along with two 'characteristics' axes such as storage ability and user prioritizations (Shakya et al., 2019). Soudan and Darya (Soudan and Darya, 2020) contributed to a smart off-grid hybrid PV/battery/ diesel power system whereby an algorithm with smart switching control can sustain power during the nighttime with help of a well-controlled battery and minimal use of diesel Genset. ...
Article
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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/kWhforasinglehomewhiletheLCOEforthegroupofhousesloadequals1.45US/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 5,625USand1,079,210US 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.
... The challenge in this paper is that physical obstacles, high temperatures are not considered during real-time implementation. Shakya et al. established a modification in the objective function to develop a path for smart metering applications [21]. ETX and lifetime are considered as metrics to calculate the rank of the node for DODAG formation. ...
Article
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Forested areas are extremely vulnerable to disasters leading to environmental destruction. Forest Fire is one among them which requires immediate attention. There are lot of works done by authors where Wireless Sensors and IoT have been used for forest fire monitoring. So, towards monitoring the forest fire and managing the energy efficiently in IoT, Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Low power lossy networks (E-RPL) was developed. There were challenges about the scalability of the network resulting in a large end-to-end delay and less packet delivery which led to the development of Aggregator-based Energy Efficient RPL with Data Compression (CAA-ERPL). Though CAA-ERPL proved effective in terms of reduced packet delivery, less energy consumption, and increased packet delivery ratio for varying number of nodes, there is still challenge in the selection of aggregator which is based purely on probability percentage of nodes. There has been research work where fuzzy logic been employed for Mobile Ad-hoc Routing, RPL routing and cluster head selection in Wireless Sensor. There has been no work where fuzzy logic is employed for aggregator selection in Energy Efficient RPL. So accordingly, we here have proposed Fuzzy Based Aggregator selection in Energy-efficient RPL for region thereby forming DODAG for communicating to Fog/Edge. We here have developed fuzzy inference rules for selecting the aggregator based on strength which takes residual power, Node degree, and Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as input metrics. The Fuzzy Aggregator Energy Efficient RPL (FA-ERPL) based on fuzzy inference rules were analysed against E-RPL in terms of scalability (First and Half Node die), Energy Consumption, and aggregator node energy deviation. From the analysis, it was found that FA-ERPL performed better than E-RPL. These were simulated using MATLAB and results.
... Moreover, conventional approaches to rural electrification systems design need to be re-evaluated and design solutions must be conceptualized to achieve reliable, affordable, and sustainable electrification despite uncertain load development and very low demand [39]. While the estimation of load demand is considered crucial in the design and sizing of electrification systems [40][41][42], other factors related to the sustainability of electrification systems are also equally vital. Consequently, it is also important to ensure that policy interventions are in place, especially through financial measures such as subsidies and incentives, particularly when private sector investment is required [43]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Techno-economic viability assessments of rural electrification projects, especially those that integrate renewable energy technologies, typically look at system design optimization that would yield the most favorable cost and investment scenarios. However, the true viability of these projects relies more importantly on their impact to the rural communities while ensuring positive financial returns to the project developers. This paper aims to expand the viability assessment of electrification projects in off-grid island communities in order to mainly address the apparently opposing needs of the major stakeholders at play by developing a viability assessment framework considering the techno-economic dimensions as well as the socio-economic impacts to the consumers. The analysis follows a two-phase approach, where system design optimization and financial impact calculations are done in the first phase and the socio-economic viability is accomplished in the second phase. Results suggest that high capital investment for renewable energy has a better pay-off when there is higher demand for electricity. On the other hand, consumers also tend to receive higher economic benefit as they consume more electricity. However, the low income of rural consumers strains their capacity to pay, which necessitates their engagement in more economically-productive uses of electricity. The viability assessment framework can be a useful tool for both investors and consumers as this provides important insights which can be translated into impactful interventions that may include government support through improved policy implementation that can positively sustain electricity access in off-grid communities through renewable energy.
... There is also a tendency for project developers to focus on designing a reliable and affordable electricity generation system, neglecting the demand aspect, the values placed by the end-users on the energy service, and the consumers' preferences in terms of electricity consumption [37]. The need for social acceptance of renewable energy technologies has been highlighted in numerous sustainability studies for energy access as this also impacts how communities are motivated to consume electricity [38][39][40]. ...
Article
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The most practical solution for over 70% of the world’s unelectrified population is decentralized electrification, usually with renewable energy integration. The sustainability of these systems has been a central issue with studies looking at its multidimensional nature. However, perhaps the most overlooked aspect is the ability of the consumers to proactively use electricity. This paper addresses this urgent need to understand not just the sustainability from exogenous factors but, more importantly, from the factors that motivate the end-users to consume electricity. Applying the concept of user-perceived value (UPV) in electrification, a proposed multidimensional assessment framework, consisting of 12 motivators, was grouped according to UPV categories. Using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire, 29 beneficiaries in Gilutongan Island, Cordova, Cebu, Philippines, were asked to evaluate their motivation to consume electricity, six months after they were provided with increased electricity access through a 7.92 kWp solar photovoltaic installation. Analysis showed that the households regarded 9 of the 12 factors as moderate to strong motivators, with better social standing compared to other households without electricity and the ability to engage in productive uses of electricity emerging as the strongest influencers. The proposed framework is deemed beneficial to policy-makers to pragmatically understand what drives rural households to proactively consume electricity and implement developments and policies to stimulate an increase in demand.
... Sur la caractérisation des services, il y a de nombreuses études qui portent sur la question de l'efficacité des services pour changer l'état des éléments d'entrée identifiés (Jalili Marand, Tang, & Li, 2018;Shakya, Bruce, & MacGill, 2019). Certaines classent les services sans entrer dans les détails de la définition de ces caractéristiques (Paglialonga, Lugo, & Santoro, 2018). ...
Thesis
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