Life Cycle Cost of Electricity Generation from Biomass Gasifier

India is having more than 500,000 villages of which about 85% have been electrified. But as per RGGVY (Rejiv Gandhi Grammen Vidyutikaran Yojana), the rate of village electrification is much lower as household connectivity has been fairly low. The rest 15% villages and a larger proportion of households have to be electrified. Villages have been a major concern as cost of electrification is fairly high. The most favored alternative to any kind of users is generation of electricity from diesel generating sets and renewable sources of energy. But the capital cost of renewable energy equipments is fairly high. Gradually, there is a reduction in the prices of these systems due to availability of better technological options and they are becoming competitive to grid electricity. In this paper, an attempt has been made to calculate the cost of production of electricity from stand-alone, off-grid devices biomass gasifiers (both dual fuel and pure gas type) and compare with that of diesel generating sets by using the concept of LCC (life cycle costing) and Homer software. It is found that the cost of per unit electricity generation (kWh) has been always the lowest in comparison to diesel generating sets even if the price of biomass increases to some extent.