Techno-economic Analysis of Hybrid Energy System Connected to an Unreliable Grid: A Case Study of a Rural Community in Nigeria

A significant number of Nigerian citizens lives in remote and rural settlements often without access to the utility grid. Even those areas connected to the grid still do experience frequent and prolonged power outages (as much as 18 hours on some days). Therefore, they have to rely on portable generators to power their electrical equipment during load shed, using firewood for cooking and burning of kerosene lamps for lighting up their homes which is not environmentally friendly. Proper sizing of multiple power sources complemented with or without a storage system has been shown to be the best long-term solution for the power challenge of Nigeria. In this paper, the technical and economic feasibility of the different combinations of energy sources (grid, wind turbine, solar photovoltaic (PV), diesel generator (DG) and battery) are carried out to meet the energy requirement of a remote village in Nigeria using HOMER (Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources) Pro software. The aim is to determine the optimal configuration of a grid-connected Hybrid Renewable Energy System (HRES) that has the lowest net present cost (NPC) for the selected case study. It is shown from the simulation result that the incorporation of solar PV and battery storage into the existing system reduces the NPC by 32.3% and decreases the annual diesel fuel usage by 48.9%.