Study of a hybrid renewable energy system for a rural school in Tagzirt, Morocco

Abstract

The continuous rise of energy demand worldwide combined with the decrease of natural resources such as fossil fuel represents a huge energy problem which facing humanity. Industry as well as consumers must rethink how to produce and use energy at low cost price. Renewable Energy (RE) applications and energy savings are keys to meet this challenge in a sustainable way and reduce the percentage of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission to environment, which reduces the global warming. This paper presents a methodology to systematically formulate a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) for a rural school based at Tagzirt, Morocco, which consists of solar, wind and diesel generator as a backup resource as well as battery storage, from the preliminary design stage to the optimal operation. The computation software used for this work is HOMER Pro 3.2.3. The analysis of such hybrid energy systems configuration feeding AC school load of 23 kWh/day energy consumption with a 6.02 kW maximum load demand. The simulation results show that optimized size of components, Wind turbine (2 kW) – solar (5 kW) - diesel generator (7.8 kW) and optimized cost of energy about 1.12 $/kWh.