Modified Minimum Spanning Tree for Optimised DC Microgrid Cabling Design

The construction of low-cost nanogrids could help speed up the electrification rate in remote communities in sub-Saharan Africa. One of the challenges in nanogrid design for these communities is the uncertainty in future load demand profiles impacting the cabling topology. We propose two new wiring design approaches for radial direct current power distribution systems. The first one is a modified minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm and the second one is an adaptive shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA). Their objective is to identify the optimal cable path and the lowest cost wiring characteristics to electrify rural areas with poor infrastructural development. A comparative study of computation burdens has shown the applicability limits relative to the SFLA based approach and encouraged the implementation of the MST as it is faster and does not imply any limitation regarding the number of dwellings to electrify, while providing low-cost wiring design option. The latter is applied to a village located in Kenya and demonstrated more than 25% savings on the entire system cabling cost compared to a classical wiring design based on shortest-path calculation.