Prefeasibility and sizing tool for renewable energy supply of rural areas

The importance of the energy access as a driver of development is well recognized by international organizations and is an important topic to address. It is estimated that 1.06 billion people does not have access to electricity and an 87% of them live in rural areas. The present thesis focuses on the application of renewable energy technologies for rural electrification purposes. A computational Excel-based tool has been designed for this purpose, proposed for sizing energy systems using renewables, which is one of the first steps to evaluate the solution for rural electrification projects. The opening stage of this work consists in the identification of a set of software available in the market dedicated to simulation, sizing, optimization of new or existing systems; here, a gap that this project intends to fill was identified: to give the chance to skilled and new users to perform dimensional and economical estimations of some equipment configurations in a free and open-source tool, been customizable and as general as possible in order to be applied in different contexts. A section dedicated to the selected energy sources explains the principles used for the internal calculations made by the sizing tool. This literature review helped the understanding of the conversion systems, based on the status of the technologies, historical data of existing projects and predictions from experts and organizations. Following this, we present a chapter that explains the logic of the sizing procedure and how the tool works. The tool starts from the resource data extraction, continues with the energy requirements input or estimation, sizes the power conversion and backup/storage system based on the resources available and the load, and finally presents the results for the user to compare and choose among the different configurations. Three main technologies have been selected for electricity production: solar photovoltaic (PV), hydro and wind; two complementary options available: batteries for storage and diesel generator as backup. thermal requirements coverage by using biogas is an additional capacity of the tool. The final chapter aims to validate the results by the assessment of three different study cases. The evaluations are made using existing data adapted to the sizing tool, confronting the outputs with those from Homer (the most popular software on the market), which permits the identification of strong and weak points of this the presented tool.