Remote area power supply through suitable solar PV augmented micro‐hydro generation: A case study

Electrification in remote villages using locally available hybrid renewable energy sources is a viable option to eradicate energy poverty. At the same time, energy supply to the unprivileged population at the affordable cost is a major issue. Moreover, appropriate technology is the key factor for the sustainable operation of small-scale generation system in remote places. Therefore, in this paper, a simple controller-based standalone solar photovoltaic (PV) augmented micro-hydro generation system suitable for remote area has been proposed. Because of its robustness for wide speed range applications, doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) has been used for micro-hydro power generation in the proposed scheme. The developed controller effectively stabilizes the load voltage with load, micro-hydro generation, and solar PV generation variations. In order to provide cost-effective renewable power supply to the rural population, a generation capacity trade-off criterion has been developed considering solar PV and micro-hydro generations as the two operators. In the proposed trade-off process, cost analysis has been performed considering the salvage dumping cost (SDC) for solar PV. The proposed hybrid generation scheme has been simulated through HOMER Pro-3.2 for cost-benefit analysis. Also, a prototype hardware set-up for the proposed scheme has been developed and tested successfully. In this paper, Section 1 describes literature review; Section 2 discusses power generation strategy; Section 3 discusses energy cost analysis; and Section 4 describes experimental results.