Technical assessment of green PV mini-grids for rural electrification in Rwanda" Case study RWISIRABO Village

Abstract

Having access to clean energy is very essential for everyone’s health, education, and social welfare enhancements. Most countries especially sub-Saharan Africa suffer from low electrification rates and with the majority of the population living in off-grid areas, whereby the productive uses do not have access to electricity to grow up. This fact doesn’t allow the use of basic or modern technology among the population. In Rwanda, Photovoltaic microgrids are used to provide free renewable energy solutions following the National Electrification Plan (NEP) that has demarcated off-grid villages by the year 2024. In the present Thesis, different components such as PV modules, inverter, charge controller, and Batteries have been sized, simulated, and optimized for the off-grid village namely Rwisirabo located in Kayonza District, eastern province of Rwanda. The designed power plant was considered to have fixed components and the tracking systems were put in my recommendations for future work. Principally AC load within the village was 158.29 kWh/day with a peak load of 21.6 kW, with COE $0.444/kWh was found as an optimum of the power plant. HOMER was chosen as the best simulating software in the present thesis. Electrical energy from the SPV power plant supplies power directly to the Ac load and the storage battery gets charged in any case there is excess energy produced and are discharged so that load remains connected to the power electricity. The load has been suggested for households, small businesses, secondary schools, health posts, police posts, community churches, and deferrable loads as water pumping. While designing and sizing of the microgrid, the simulation and optimization were carried out based on the daily consumption, weather parameters like solar irradiance and temperature, the economics of integrated system elements, and other parameters in which the total Net Present Cost and Levelized COE have to be minimized to select economically feasible and technically capable solar PV power plant. The data from design is used for simulation as input of HOMER software to figure out the total energy production per year.