Design of Hybrid Power Plant System for Communal and Office Loads in Indonesia

Most of rural areas in Indonesia are still undeveloped and lacked of electric power. One suitable solution to solve this insufficient power is to exploit the available renewable energy potentials by building power plant with hybrid systems. The hybrid system combines renewable with non-renewable energy sources to produce electricity that will be delivered to the load center. In this paper, an off-grid hybrid power plant will be designed at a rural area where the electrification ratio is low. This area is called Leiting Village, located in Aru Islands District, Maluku Province. This area owns annual solar irradiation and wind speed of 5.27 kWh/m2/day and 4.88 m/s, respectively. These renewable energy resources will be utilized to determine the most economical hybrid system for two types of loads, namely communal load of 20 kWh with a peak load of 2.15 kWp and administrative office load of 11 kWh with a peak load of 1 kWp. The designed system uses the optimization method embedded in HOMER Pro and PVsyst application softwares. The selected hybrid system is based on the lowest Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) value.