Many times, Armed Forces are deployed in bases
in remote areas on the borders or Islands, which are far flung
areas away from mainland. In many such cases, these areas do
not have their power requirements through the main grid supply
and entire power requirement of the deployment is supplied by
diesel generators. These diesel generators have high
environmental impact due to emission of greenhouse gases and
are highly uneconomical as logistic sustenance of remote bases
for supply of fuel is very challenging, Fossil fuel has to be
supplied by vehicles, helicopters, boats or manually carried to
hill tops. This increases the overall cost of deploying armed
forces in remote areas. In recent years with the advancements in
power electronic components and renewable energy,
development in Microgrids (MGs) have shown a way to reduce
dependency on main power grids. Hence, with the help of MGs,
renewable energy can be used to fulfill power requirements of
the armed forces deployed in remote places. In this work, a MG
with capacity of 1MW has been designed keeping the special
needs of armed forces as a major consideration. Solar power has
been used as a primary renewable energy source in the proposed
design. In order to mitigate the adverse effects of meteorological
and extreme conditions on the solar power generation capacity,
energy storage system in the form of batteries has also been
provided. Batteries store power when excess power is generated
from the photo voltaic (PV) system and discharge the power
when power demand is higher than the PV generated power.
Diesel generator sets have also been used to run critical loads,
provide reliability and as backup to critical operations catering
for outages, night time needs and un-expected meteorological
conditions. MATLAB has been used to design and simulate the
proposed MG. Working of the MG has also been demonstrated
for varying meteorological and varying load conditions as well.
The proposed design works satisfactory in all cases.
Hybrid renewable energy/hybrid desalination potentials for remote areas: selected cases studied in Egypt
