Abstract:
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Globally, the poor in rural areas without access to electricity continue to struggle
with serious challenges. These include health issues, limited educational opportunities,
biomass cooking fuels contributing to poor health, poor nutrition, water
availability, livelihood challenges and economic poverty. The United Nations (UN)
has recognized these challenges and has officially transcribed into the Eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), later becoming the seventeen Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). The seventh of the SDGs is to ensure affordable, reliable,
sustainable and modern energy to all.
With that in mind, many governments, organizations and researchers have been
focusing their work on finding ways to provide energy to underdeveloped communities,
especially in the form of electricity. Despite the efforts, still nearly 1.2 billion
people worldwide lacked electricity in 2014. More than eight out of ten people without
access to electricity live in rural areas, so being most of the communities without
electricity rural, rural electrification has aroused plenty of attention.
The thesis presents a rural electrification project developed in Dewgain, a community
from the Jharkhand State in India. Dewgain is already connected to the electrical
grid, but as many other rural communities in Jharkhand, the electric service is
far from reliable.
Two visits were conducted at the village for data acquisition. The methodology
followed during the visits is presented, while the analysis of the results sets the
basement for the design of the solution. From the visit outcomes load profiles of the
electrical consumption expected are obtained.
Based on the most accessible renewable resources from the region, a hybrid solar
photovoltaic and biomass rice-husk gasifier generation system is dimensioned. Using
market-available components and state of the art technologies an optimisation
process is presented for dimensioning the system.
The resulting optimised design is validated matching the generation with the expected
demand. Finally, the costs of implementation and operation of the solution
are presented, in a 20 years service life projection. |