Sustainable Energy Access in Developing Markets Through Business-Based Hybrid System Modeling

Abstract

Pakistan’s economic growth is being impacted by the energy crisis, because of nation’s reliance on expensive electricity, obtained from independent power producers (IPPs). To address this issue, herein, we report an analysis of various off-grid and grid-connected hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES), for cheap electrification of area under municipal committee (MC) Jhelum, district Jhelum, Pakistan. Various HRES systems are designed, simulated, and optimized using HOMER Pro software, with a focus on techno-economic factors. The net present cost (NPC) and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for the proposed designs are obtained and refined by adjusting the sensitive parameters, that is, components costs, nominal discount rate, inflation rate, and annual capacity shortage of components. The results reveal that the most economical system obtained is grid-connected system, which comprises of solar photovoltaic (PV), diesel generators (DGs), and batteries, with LCOE (0.03719 $/kWh) and NPC (1,797,396 $). Robustness analysis is carried out: (1) to confirm the technical reliability of proposed system, (2) comparing our system’s LCOE with government tariff and previous literature, which reveals that the proposed system provides cheaper electricity. Finally, we discussed potential barriers like technical, policy making, social awareness, social acceptance, and economic that affect implementation of such systems. We have provided recommendations to rectify these barriers for successfully deploying sustainable energy systems across the country.