Assessments of Hybrid Renewable Energy System Optimal Configurations for Rural Healthcare Facilities

Abstract

In this paper, optimal configurations assessments of hybrid renewable system for rural healthcare facilities in three grid nonconnected rural villages in Nigeria were conducted. These facilities contains an emergency room, consulting room, nurse/injection room, male ward, female ward, a labour room and a laboratory with average total daily energy consumption of 15.5kWh and 2.75kW peak demand. The assessment of configurations that optimally meet the daily load demand with zero loss of power supply probability (LPSP) was carried out using HOMER software, by considering three energy resources; solar photovoltaic (PV), wind and diesel with battery energy storage. The optimization results shows hybrid PV/wind/diesel/battery system as the most cost-effective configuration for powering the rural health facilities located in both Sokoto and Enugu, while hybrid PV/diesel/battery system is considered the best for Iseyin rural healthcare facility. The overall results indicated that not only does the considered hybrid system configurations out-performed diesel-only scenario in terms of cost of energy production in all the three sites, but also exhibited better performance in the areas of quantity of energy production, fuel consumption and CO2 reduction. It is therefore concluded that, inclusion of renewable energy resources, such as PV and wind in the design and implementation of power supply systems for the rural healthcare facilities in the selected sites will definitely enhance the quality of healthcare delivery.