Feasibility Study of Energy Hybrid Systems for Villages of the Southern Moroccan Coastline

Abstract

In this paper technical and economic feasibility study of hybrid system with storage for a fishing village in the southern Moroccan coastline is carried out. The village under study can stand for most fishing villages of the area of southern Moroccan coastline. Since these villages might not have easy access to the national electricity grid, their energy needs are ensured by highly polluting generators with high energy generation cost in the long term. One of the solutions for decreasing power systems energy cost in these villages is installation of hybrid energy systems. In order to comprehend the viability of such systems, a pilot site was chosen: Lamhiriz, a small village of 4625 inhabitants with an annual consumption of 1.3 GWh. The new power system investigated for Lamhiriz village is diesel-wind hybrid system with electrochemical and thermal storages. First, energy consumption and wind potential of Lamhiriz are presented, then it comes the design of the hybrid system that was approached in two ways: a first configuration of the hybrid system is obtained by economical simulation on HOMER software. In a second step, the sizing problem is solved as an optimization problem where we try to minimize the cost of energy generated by each element of the system in order to meet the electrical demand. Once the optimum sizing obtained, the appropriate energy management is chosen. The GAMS software was used to approach the optimal sizing and energy management. The results found by both HOMER and GAMS are compared in order to see the one meeting the expectations of an optimized system. Energy cost results brought by the optimized hybrid system is compared with energy cost brought by a conventional diesel system.