Assessment of the technical effectiveness of SIRES in a rural setting

Abstract

Globally, energy availability is a severe problem in majority of the rural areas. A novel approach called Smart Integrated Renewable Energy Systems (SIRES) is proposed to fulfill the fundamental demands in rural areas by matching them to resources in a sustainable manner. Freely available renewable resources such as insolation, wind, water and biomass are utilized to satisfy basic needs such as biogas for cooking, domestic and irrigation water and electricity. In this paper, the probability that SIRES fulfills these needs, or in short, Need Fulfillment Probability (NFP), is estimated for four different weather conditions where insolation and wind resources are varied. NFP of SIRES is highest on a high wind sunny day and is estimated to be 0.9627. NFP of SIRES was compared to microgrid for the considered weather conditions.