Comparative Analysis of Conventional Single and Hybrid Photovoltaic Solar Energy System for Off-Grid Rural Electrification

Renewable energy sources are essential around the globe in power generation with solar photovoltaic energy system as one of the major sources. Lack of access to affordable and reliable power in rural off-grid communities affects their wellbeing in terms of economic and social activities. In Nigeria, over 60% of Nigerian rural communities are not grid connected and lack access to affordable and reliable power. Most off-grid rural communities are depending on candles, kerosene lamps, and fossil fuel generators which are often used for lighting purposes of households, public buildings, or commercial units etc. In this paper, Falde community in Arewa LGA of Kebbi State is used as a case study. It presents a generalized model using MATLAB codes/Simulink (MATLAB Function) for data analysis to calculate power and energy demand of a selected community by using population density as varying factor with an estimated number of five (5) people per household. The average energy demand and peak load for Falde community were 726.65kWh/day and 90.86kW respectively which were used in sizing system components for system configurations. The system configurations include centralized diesel generating set (DGS), centralized photovoltaic (PV) system, a hybrid combination of DGS/PV/battery, DGS/PV, PV/battery and DGS/battery system. HOMER Pro software was used for simulation and comparative analysis of six different system configurations based on cost, greenhouse gasses emissions, sensitivity analysis, and systems optimization to select the best optimized result suitable for the selected community. The best suitable solutions to electrify and improve economic activities of the selected community out of the six configurations showed that Solar PV system has the least value of NPC (₦433,823,300.00), and DGS/PV have the highest energy production of 328,500kWh/year and finally Solar PV and PV/Battery have Zero emission of greenhouse gasses. The implementation of this research work will guarantee clean and reliable power to rural off-grid communities with reduced emission of greenhouse gasses and further ease the return on investment by potential investors.