Design, Sizing and Economic feasibility of a hybrid PV/Diesel/Battery based Water Pumping System for Farmland /

Abstract

Renewable energy systems are a promising source of sustainable energy. Energy sys-tems based on hybrid renewables sources are lucrative and with negligible carbon foot-print, moreover, they are evolving as a progressively successful choice for the rural areas where accessibility of energy from the grid is poor. This study exhibits an opti-mum design, sizing of PV and diesel based renewable energy system, particular envi-ronmental conditions, specifications of the system and day-to-day energy requirement data of the specific site in the San Joaquin Valley, CA, USA is carried in order to validate the water required for the wheat crop. Wheat crop is one of the main crops of the world which has different development stages and in each development stage, it requires a different amount of water. In addition to water demand which is our irriga-tion load, farmland residential energy requirements were also considered and simu-lated. Six distinctive ideal setups, viz. PV/battery, PV/diesel and battery, wind/battery, PV/wind/Diesel generator & battery, wind/PV/battery and Diesel generator were thor-oughly examined in respect of net present cost (NPC) and cost of energy (COE) to decide most financially appropriate choice based upon the above mentioned objective. For financial investigation and ideal sizing, all the essential simulations and affirma-tion is done utilizing the HOMER software (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable) programming. Results obtained from simulations depict that PV/die-sel/battery is the optimum arrangement for the particular site, the purpose of this work lies in utilizing the tools from HOMER and successively to do technical as well as economical investigation in addition to environmental aspects of the proposed HRES (Hybrid Renewable Energy System) and authenticate the scheme.