Toward a distributed renewable based energy system for Lacor hospital

The Ugandan national grid is highly unstable and does not guarantee continuity of service, with frequent unplanned blackouts that can last several hours. Consequently, the economic activities, which need high reliable electricity supply, are forced to implement stand-alone distributed power plants to feed their loads. The generation systems adopted in these cases are mainly diesel generators, that are a simple and affordable technology, but characterized by high O&M costs. In these contexts, the development of renewable power plants is leading to the spread of hybrid micro grids, which combine conventional and alternative sources. This resources integration could limit the production cost and enhance the system reliability making it independent from the aleatory behaviour of renewables. Unfortunately, this layout, which is implemented in St. Mary’s Hospital, is complex to manage and operate correctly. This thesis has the purpose to reduce cost and to increase reliability of energy supply by improvement of the hospital grid. Initially, a detailed system analysis is carried out by means of two data collection campaigns and simulations to quantify the current COE and the main criticisms. Effectively, the hospital has to compensate the unstable national grid with consequent problems of cost and reliability. After, two strategies are considered to transform the current network into an advanced distributed energy system. The first step is the design and installation of the Bticino’s advanced metering system to quantify and know instantaneously the energy fluxes. Afterward, the further development is the PMS: the control system lead by the Authors algorithm and coupled with a lithium battery. Thanks to the algorithm implementation in VBA code, the simulations give the value of the COE reduction and the annual energy cost saving. Besides the choice of suitable technologies, it is worth to consider the specific cultural context of developing countries and the unique humanitarian and technical prestige of the Lacor Hospital. These themes have been treated specifically considering the reality of St. Mary's Hospital, where the Authors focus their attention on the energetic issues.