Multiyear load growth based techno-financial evaluation of a microgrid for an academic institution

An escalating energy demand can be seen especially in developing and fast-growing economies such as India. Conventional energy resources meet most of the energy demand. The alarming issue of global warming and the dependency on fossil fuels to meet the energy demand has motivated the use of clean energy sources. In this context, the educational institutions with high electricity consumption in India have been planning to opt for locally available renewable energy sources to meet their electricity demand. Even one of the most crucial issues in such academic institutions is the food waste management. Most of the institutes, give up their food wastage to piggeries which are directly fed to animals or discarded or dumped irrationally. In this paper, an optimal microgrid solution using locally available energy resources for a real physical location considering its real time-power demand is proposed. Various scenarios and different combinations of energy sources, such as solar photovoltaic, food waste based biogas plant, and a diesel generator as backup have been considered along with batteries as storage in off-grid and grid-connected systems. Hybrid optimization of multiple electric renewables (HOMER) PRO software package is utilized for detailed technical and financial analysis with a multiyear growth approach to determine the optimal energy system, which is unlikely observed in literature so far. The detailed analysis results illustrate that photovoltaic contributes most of the electricity being generated in all the scenarios. The renewable fraction is comparatively high in the off-grid system in the range of 92% to 100% as compared with 63% to 80% in grid-connected systems. The results obtained also show that levelized cost of electricity is low in case of grid-connected systems varying between 0.18 Indian National Rupee (INR)/kWh to 1.39 INR/kWh in contrast to 11.96 INR/kWh to 18.47 INR/kWh for off-grid systems.