Priority based Energy Distribution for Off-grid Rural Electrification

Abstract

Rural off-grid electrification is always very challenging due to mostly using limited output renewable energy source such as solar power system. Owing to its nature of power generation that depends on weather condition, the reliability in power provision is often affected by uncontrolled overwhelming usage or bad weather condition. Total power system blackout that frequently happens not only disturb the night activity routine but also can be life threatening if the rural community is unable to initiate telephony communication with the outside world during state of emergency due to power outage. In order to reduce the frequency of total system blackout caused by the reasons mentioned, we proposed a priority-based energy distribution scheme to assist the off-grid standalone solar power system to improve the overall operating hours of the critical appliances in rural areas. The scheme takes into consideration of criticality of the home appliances as defined by the rural users, so that the system would distribute power supply based on the current state of the system with an objective to prolong the service availability of the critical appliances that matter the most to the users. The scheme has been evaluated under simulated scenario and has shown a 100% operation availability of the critical appliance is achievable even during bad weather season that has very low solar input.