Techno-economic design and performance evaluation of Photovoltaic/Diesel/Batteries system through simulation of the energy flow using generated solar radiation data

Apart from the techno-economic design of hybrid PV energy systems, their simulation and performance prediction help to validate the configurations in terms of reliability before implementation. However, they are not usually based on radiation data collected in short time interval due to their unavailability. In this work, after a techno-economic design of Photovoltaic/Diesel/Batteries, we propose to evaluate the energy performance through the simulation of energy flow by using hourly solar radiation data converted from monthly average values with the Duffie and Beckman algorithm. As a case study, the monthly average daily solar radiation data of Maroua were converted into one year hourly values. The hourly radiation data converted were used to simulate the energy flow of optimal configurations obtained by three different methods for three types of household electricity demands. From the hourly simulation, the technical performance was evaluated by observing the patterns of the battery state of charge, the excess and deficit energy, and by determining the loss of power supply probability and the renewable fraction. The results showed that the optimal configurations in terms of cost, reliability and sustainability consisting of PV of 200 W and batteries of 200 Ah were 2PV/2 batteries (0.8390 $/kWh), 4PV/2 batteries (0.6333 $/kWh) and 8PV/2 batteries (0.3665 $/kWh) respectively for the low, medium and high household energy consumers. It was also observed that, the proposed configurations will be profitable compared to grid cost if the distance from the grid line to the household is greater than: 650 m for the low and high consumers and 700 m for the medium consumer. The methodology proposed may be used to evaluate the performance and validate a hybrid system configuration especially for sites where the hourly radiation data are unavailable.