Pre-Installation Techno-Economic Feasibility Studies of a Food-Energy Park as a Community MG

Rising difficulties of fast urbanization and climate related issues, have popularize the concepts of community living at sub-urban areas meeting the basic needs of shelter, food and energy. Such entities are called Food-Energy Park (FEP) that are a part of community microgrids (CMG) having multiple energy efficient green buildings. The FEPs envisions the idea to be self-sufficient (fully or partially) in terms of growing its own food by applying modern high density farming strategies and producing energy using renewable energy sources (RESs). It mostly installs solar photovoltaic (PV), solar water heaters, wind turbines, battery banks and electric vehicles (EVs). Such CMGs with its own sources and loads could be attached to the low voltage (LV) power system and use diesel generator (DG) as a needed backup. Such CMGs have green buildings, viz., residential, school with community kitchen, primary health centre, etc., have multiple loads like lights, heating and cooling, security, as well as motor loads. Similarly, the agricultural loads comprises of pumps for drip irrigation, livestock shed, and miniature cold storage. All these aggregation results in system of systems (SoSs) architecture for CMGs. In this paper, pre-installation techno-economic studies of an FEP on a 1 hectare (2.5 acres) land is done using predictive control as a part of CMG for attaining proper land utilization, component selection, optimal sizing, and energy management. It involves several testing and true operational conditions such as forecasted data for energy output and load deviations, use of batteries and EVs for scheduling, and reduce DGs dependency.