Efficient Resource Sizing and Placement for Clustered Solar DC Microgrids

Around one billion people worldwide in developing countries are living without access to electricity. Electrification through national grids for most of these people is not feasible due to a) lack of funds required for building large generation plants and b) high costs of transmission and distribution requirements to electrify these predominantly remote off-grid regions. Therefore, for off-grid rural electrification, solar photovoltaic (PV) based DC microgrids are becoming very popular due to their low overall cost. However, standard radial microgrid architectures with central placement of Generation and Storage Unit (GSU) are not optimum for clustered villages commonly found in many African countries. This paper proposes a framework for identification of efficient placement and sizing of solar PV GSU in clustered environments without any fundamental change in the associated hardware (solar panels, storage, conductors, and power processing units) commonly used in electrification schemes worldwide. Based upon the proposed framework, different power provisioning scenarios are evaluated (for a site in Africa), and results show that through an optimum placement of GSU, up to 8% gains (cost reduction) can be achieved for microgrid operating in a clustered environment.