Remote area electrification is a major concern for a government of any developing nation. India is also working for it but despite continuous efforts towards remote area electrification, several thousand households in India are un-electrified. Several schemes have been launched by Government for electrification of such areas through grid extension but still many areas have not been covered under the proposed schemes due to economic, environmental and geographical reasons. Narayanpur district in Chhattisgarh state of India has un-electrified regions and various issues like poor literacy, untreated water facility and lack of access to communication networks. In order to find viable option of electricity supply to this region, a case study has been performed for the feasibility of off-grid floating photovoltaic (PV) system, on-ground PV system and grid extension along with their comparative analysis with respect to certain parameters i.e. net present value (NPV), cost of energy (CoE), environment cleanliness and social acceptance. Floating PV and onground PV systems have been designed and simulated using System Adviser Model (SAM) software developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA. The results show that floating PV system has lowest CoE of $0.0598/kWh and least negative NPV of $185,431 as compared to other two options. However, it is found that floating PV system achieves positive NPV of $38,968 in 28th year of project life.

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This article proposes an optimal hybrid renewable energy system for auxiliaries of a cement plant located in Jamul, Chhattisgarh, India. Presently, the auxiliaries along with other loads are supplied electricity by coal based captive thermal power plant. The auxiliaries need to run without break. But, due to frequent failure of captive thermal power plant and also higher pollutant emissions, an optimal alternative system which comprises renewable source and existing diesel generator unit, was required to be proposed. For this, a comparative study is carried out by using HOMER software, among photo voltaic (PV)‐wind‐diesel‐battery (PWDB), PV‐diesel‐battery (PDB), and diesel‐only system. These systems are compared with one another considering total net present cost (NPC), pollutant emissions and cost of energy (COE). The required system constraints are taken to be zero maximum annual capacity shortage with a limit on the consumption of diesel and minimum renewable fraction equal to 800,000 L yr−1 and 30%, respectively. The study results show that PV‐wind‐diesel‐battery system has lowest NPC and COE and reduction in CO2 emissions are 11569.695 tons yr−1 compared to existing system emissions. Moreover, in this lowest NPC PV‐wind‐diesel‐battery system, the effect of using natural gas (NG), fuel oil (FO), and biodiesel (BD) in place of petroleum diesel is also studied in terms of variations of cost parameters and reductions in pollutant emissions. It is found that replacement of petroleum diesel with biodiesel results in further highest decrease in NPC, COE and pollutant emissions compared to other fuels. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 35: 221–229, 2016

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