Integrated assessment of a sustainable microgrid for a remote village in hilly region

Abstract The complexity in the design of sustainable microgrids based on renewable energy sources have increased recently due to the involvement of multiple performance indices, scenarios, and stakeholders. At disintegrated level such as rural villages in developing nations, the issue has become more severe concerning the involvement of social and cultural characteristics making the problem multidimensional with multiple objectives. Thus, a proper method which can simultaneously consider the various criteria and differing views of the multiple actors involved in varying scenarios is required. In this paper, a bi-level framework based on the integration of decision making and optimization tool for the design of a rural microgrid with a perspective of sustainable development considering the annual load growth is presented. The first design level utilizes the decision analysis models to determine the best possible energy alternatives for the microgrid design considering the number of key performance indices formulating different scenarios and acts as input to the second level of the framework. A multi-objective computational optimization tool is utilized in the second level to carry out the feasibility analysis of best energy alternative in order to obtain an optimal size with a lower cost accounting yearly load growth. The proposed framework is then implemented to design a sustainable microgrid for an unelectrified village in the hilly region. Most importantly the microgrid design based on the proposed methodology for the target site utilizes the available local resources such as solar, hydro with the dam, hydrokinetics based on river water streams, etc. as the primary energy generating sources with a diesel generator as back up along with battery and pump-hydro storage as storage systems. A total of 23 alternatives depending upon the different combination of energy sources and storage is constituted in a centralized off-grid system. Moreover, four primary performance criteria (social, technical, economic and environment) with 20 sub-criteria in 29 different scenarios are considered for evaluating the microgrid which is highly unlikely to be observed in literature so far. A discursive result illustrating the various profiles (generation and storage system) of the microgrid based on daily, monthly and yearly basis accounting the load growth is also presented.