Lanre Joseph Olatomiwa’s research while affiliated with Federal University of Technology Minna and other places

This paper takes a cursory look at the problem of inadequate power supply in the rural healthcare centres of a developing country, specifically Nigeria, and proffers strategies to address this issue through the design of hybrid renewable energy systems combined with the existing unreliable grid in order to meet the healthcare load demand, thus ensuring higher reliability of available energy sources. The simulations, analysis and results presented in this paper are based on meteorological data and the load profiles of six selected locations in Nigeria, using which hybrid grid-connected systems integrating diesel, solar and wind energy sources are designed with configurations to give optimum output. The optimised design configurations in the considered case study, Ejioku, Okuru-Ama, Damare-Polo, Agbalaenyi, Kadassaka and Doso, produce very low energy costs of of 0.0791 $/kWh, 0.115$/kWh, 0.0874 $/kWh, 0.0754$/kWh, 0.0667 $/kWh and 0.0588$/kWh, respectively, leveraging solar and wind energy sources which make higher percentage contributions at all sites. The load-following-dispatch strategy is adopted at all sites, ensuring that at every point in time, there is sufficient power to meet the needs of the healthcare centres. Further works on this topic could consider other strategies to optimise general energy usage on the demand side.

An electrical meter with the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) device measures and records the consumption of electrical energy in residential and commercial buildings. This allows for remote monitoring and management of the energy usage through an IoT platform. This IoT meters emerged due to the inability of the existing metering system to smartly integrate the IoT application into the metering market. With the emergence of IoT technology, microcontrollers and sensors are deployed for this model to avert the aforementioned challenges. The microcontroller is responsible for collecting and processing data from the meter, as well as communicating with the other components of the device. The communication module enables the meter to connect to the Internet and transmit data to the cloud, to be accessed and analyzed through an IoT platform. The voltage and current sensors give input current and voltage signal for the microcontroller for analogue to digital conversion (ADC) effect as programmed. The experimental results indicate that the meter is accurate in measuring energy consumption with a maximum relative error of -6.06% as observed in Case 3 with a rated power of 40W and absolute current of 0.02A. The negative value of the relative error suggest that the measured energy is slightly lower than the actual energy consumed. The developed meter prototype engendered smart energy measurement with modern IoT technologies, this enables remote monitoring and of energy usage.