A Comprehensive Approach to the Design of a Renewable Energy Microgrid for Rural Ethiopia: The Technical and Social Perspectives

Abstract

In view of Ethiopia’s significant renewable energy (RE) potential and the dynamic interactions among the components of the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) Nexus, we attempted to incorporate solar and small-scale hydropower into the optimal design of an environmentally friendly microgrid with the primary goal of ensuring the sustainability of irrigation water pumping, while taking advantage of existing infrastructure in various small administrative units (kebele). Any additional generated energy would be made available to the community for other needs, such as lighting and cooking, to support health and food security and improve the general quality of life. The novelty of the study stems from the utilization of in situ social data, retrieved during fieldwork interviews conducted in the kebele of interest, to ascertain the actual needs and habits of the local people. Based on these combined efforts, we were able to formulate a realistic energy demand plan for climatic conditions typical of Sub-Saharan Africa agricultural communities and analyze four different scenarios of the microgrid’s potential functionality and capital cost, given different tolerance levels of scheduled outages. We demonstrated that the RE-based microgrid would be socially and environmentally beneficial and its capital cost sensitive to the incorporation of individual or communal machines and appliances. Ultimately, the social impact investigation revealed the design would be welcomed by the local community, whose members already implement tailor-made solutions to support their agricultural activities. Finally, we argue that extended educational programs and unambiguous policies should be in place before any implementation to ensure the venture’s sustainability and functionality.

Understanding Microgrid Sustainability: A Systemic and Comprehensive Review

“…The challenge of techno-economic design is that there are assumptions regarding inflation, discount rates, downtime, and consumer payment default among others, which can alter the analysis of the feasibility of a microgrid. Many studies address the problem of rightly estimating the LCOE of a microgrid by highlighting the importance of a preliminary feasibility study of the microgrid [52,53], providing a rigorous framework [54], estimating the correct business model [56], and evaluating the different constraints [55] to better understand the local context and user needs. The same goes for taking into account good practices that have been identified in different case studies to make better assumptions when estimating the chances of success of new microgrid projects [69,201].…”

Optimal Scheduling of Hybrid Sustainable Energy Microgrid: A Case Study for a Resort in Sokhna, Egypt

“…There are many tools that can be used to obtain the optimal solution [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Among them is a powerful software tool to optimize hybrid renewables systems introduced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States and is called the Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables.…”

Environmental, social and economic factors in sustainable development with food, energy and eco-space aspect security

“…Sensitivity to climate change is extremely important in this case, mainly to problems resulting from drought and lack of access to water (problems with irrigation of crops). Therefore, it is very important to ensure the sustainability of the water supply for irrigation of the fields (Emmanouil et al 2021). The level of farms depends on many factors, including the level of education of people working on the land, socio-economic factors or access to drought-resistant plant varieties (Bedeke et al 2020;Balehey 2018).…”