Analysis of the Technico-Economic Viability of an Electric Micro-Grid with Renewable Electricity Production Sources in Elokato-Bingerville, Cote d’Ivoire

In this study, the technico-economic viability is studied, on the basis of different scenarios of electric micro-grids with renewable energy production sources, autonomous and supplied by the interconnected grid. HOMER Pro 3.13.3 Pro simulation and optimization software, Xlstat and Energy sentinel software are used for the evaluation of different technical and economic scenarios of system components, in order to obtain the most cost-effective configuration. To do this, the case study of the village of ELOKATO identifies the optimal options for the use of renewable energies for rural electrification in order to increase the electricity coverage rate. In our case study, after the various simulations, HOMER identified 13 scenarios and configurations deemed to be the most profitable, from the parameters and configurations without photovoltaic components have high COEs and very high initial investment costs in the order of several million US $. Renewable energy power generators require high initial investments and relatively low operating costs. The most important costs are generated by the battery park and then come the photovoltaic panels. The hybrid PV/wind/diesel/hydropower system is profitable if the distance from the village to the transformer station is greater than 1.90 km. The results show great potential for using these hybridized production sources with or without a generator to meet the electricity needs of a village.


Introduction
Africa will see its population double in 30 years to reach nearly 2.5 billion inhabitants by 2050. Many people identify the economic development of countries on the African continent as the main response to this exponential population growth.
Africa will experience a period of sustained and unprecedented growth. By 2050, the continent will have a population of at least 2 billion people (twice as many as today), 40% of whom will be in rural areas [1].
About 645 million Africans do not have access to electricity. Per capita, energy consumption in sub-Saharan Africa is currently estimated at 181 kilowatts per year, the lowest of any continent compared to that of Europe and the United States of America, which are 6500 kilowatts and 13,000 respectively kilowatts per year. The loss of 2% and 4% of the GDP in Africa is estimated, in particular, by the shortage of electricity in the energy sector, which significantly slows down economic growth, job creation and investment [2].
If energy trends do not change, in 2030 Africa will still have 655 million people (42% of the population) without access to electricity and 866 million (56% of the population) people without clean fuels and cooking technologies, leaving the majority of the population deprived of the right to a more productive and healthy life. 2/3 of these populations live in rural areas without access to the national electricity grid.
Connection to the network is unaffordable and sometimes unreliable. We must therefore consider other alternatives.
Cote d'Ivoire has very early developed a policy of access to electricity based on the exploitation of its hydraulic and thermal resources.
Rural electrification is one of the major axes of the Ivorian Government's economic and social policy. To this end, this sub-sector has benefited from constant historical support from the public authorities. The major programs in- These results are certainly encouraging, but still quite weak. Moreover, from another point of view, even if the progress is good as confirmed by the authorities of the sector, it still faces difficulties related to the allocated resources, which difficulties should be overcome by the mobilization of more resources to accelerate the implementation of this program and then extend it to the small rural community.
Indeed, of the 8513 localities in Cote d'Ivoire, there are still 4555 non-electrified localities [4]. However, Cote d'Ivoire has varied and sufficient natural energy resources to meet its own energy needs through the implementation of an appropriate energy policy and master plan.  In addition, the Rural Electrification Program (PRONER) and viable master plan remain at the center of the concerns of the country, which is committed to continuing and amplifying the works at the rate of a minimum of 500 new localities electrified each year, in order to achieve the goal of total electrification of Côte d'Ivoire by 2025.
We must therefore use all the advantages offered by renewable energies and maximize all the economic, technological and environmental benefits that they can provide.
However, if the technologies and operating modes of conventional electricity systems are known and sometimes predictable, this is not the case for renewable energy micro-grids because their operating modes and their output powers are influenced by meteorology and climatic conditions Also despite the abundant solar energy, with a daily sunshine time of 6, the capital cost of PV systems has always been the main barrier to the use of solar energy However, PV alone cannot supply energy at noon and therefore has to be supported by alternative energy sources such batterie as wind and/or genset, and others.
Many researchers have extensively studied micro-grid systems based on re-Smart Grid and Renewable Energy newable energies. Several studies [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] have shown that the use of renewable energy would make it possible to electrify these isolated rural areas.
Other work [7] [8] [9] [10] has focused on optimizing, planning, and managing the design of a renewable energy-based hybrid microgrid with the aim of minimizing the life cycle cost. The results showed that the mixed renewable and diesel micro-grids would have the lowest life cycle cost and a relatively low carbon footprint.
To the best of our knowledge, any paper focuses on the economic viability of an electric micro-grid with renewable electricity in Western Africa Our study focuses on the analysis of the technical and economic viability of an electric micro-grid with renewable electricity production sources in Elokato-Bingerville, a village of Côte d'Ivoire. We use lots of professional software with authorized license to do the simulations and measures.
This paper presents the result of the simulation of 13 scenarios and configurations deemed to be most profitable for our microgrid.
The rest of the paper consists of the following main sections. Section 2 presents the characteristic of software used a. The methodology is presented in Section 3. • People's support for the renewable energy project; • Availability of energy resources (wind, streams, biomass, low solar deposit compared to the rest of the country).

Homer Pro
The HOMER Pro 3.13.3 micro-grid simulation software, developed by the National  useful features such as the R language and machine learning, which give it great computational robustness. The many features offered by XLSTAT make Excel an excellent tool for statistical analysis and modeling, making it possible to cover all data processing needs. In this study we will mainly use the descriptive statistics interface for the significance of the data.

Energy Sentinel Software (Energy Team, Italy)
As part of this study, for the collection of real-time data, a metering devicewas set up and connected to the power transformer that supplies the village of Elokato with electricity. Energy sentinel is the proprietary software of the Italian smart metering system supplier Energy Team ( Figure 3).
The counting system is a microcontroller called X-METER which allows data acquisition through sensors and probes. These data are stored on a remote data Smart Grid and Renewable Energy server connected to the Internet (cloud) and viewable by secure access (Figure 4).
HOMER Pro 3.13.3 software is used for the simulation and optimization of the microgrid to be planned. It provides an overview of the different configurations and combinations of possible production sources in order to minimize the costs of micro-grid components.
The energy resources available, easily mobilized on the Elokato site, to produce electricity are solar photovoltaic, hydraulic (small hydro) and wind sources.
The following sessions provide more details on the resources and components to build an electricity production system from renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal)  T. Minayégnan et al.

Data Collection and Major Components of the System
The electrical load to be covered The identification and analysis of demand remain the most important steps in the design and sizing of a micro-grid, it will determine the scope of the production system to be built. The daily loads follow a concentrated distribution mainly more at night than during the day: a first tranche from 6pm to 11pm and a second tranche from midnight to 6am. The peak load is observed between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.
The average daily consumption recorded over a year is 662.08 kWh/day for an alternating load (AC).
As the curve shows, the annual peak of consumption is observed in the month of December ( Figure 6).
Electricity needs are highest during the first and last quarter of the year, which Source: Homer Energy 3.13.2 Pro. correspond respectively to the period of high heat and the end of year holiday period (generation, cultural, etc.) (Figure 7).

Major components of the system
The essential components of the hybrid system for the micro-grid within the framework of this project are: a photovoltaic system, a wind turbine, a chemical storage system (battery), a diesel generator, the national grid, a DC/AC converter ( Figure 8).    We choose to use the solar irradiation and light data for the village of Elokato come from the American national database of the National Solar Radiation Database ( Figure 9).
The global annual horizontal solar radiation is shown in Figure 9. The daily average over the year is 4.76 kWh/m².

Photovoltaic (PV) module
For the study, the chosen PV module is of the monocrystalline silicon type, manufactured by Jinko Solar (Table 1). Figure 9. Annual horizontal solar radiation. The derating factor that was applied to calculate the reduced power output under actual operating conditions compared to rated conditions is 88% ( Figure 10).

Wind turbine
The wind generator used for the simulations is of the generic type Eolien Generic 3kW-G3 from the HOMER Energy database. It is a 3kW wind turbine connected to the AC bus ( Figure 11).   The values used in this study are taken from NASA metrological data available in the HOMER Pro database. The average annual speed was about 3.28 m/s, measured at an anemometer height of 50 m (Figure 12).
HOMER calculates the output power of the wind turbine at each time step using a three-step process: • Calculation of the wind speed at the height of the hub of the wind turbine.
• Calculation of the amount of energy produced by the wind turbine at this wind speed with a standard air density. • Adjustment of the power value according to the real air density.

Turbine
A 20 kW Guinard Energies tidal turbine (P154) was chosen as the source of hydraulic production within the framework of this study. It is a generator connected to the AC bus, with the following characteristics: • The storage system is wired in 48 V; • Number of thongs: 24; • Manufacturer: BAE Secura PVV Solar Batteries (Figures 13-15).

Generator
To improve the reliability of the 25 KW diesel generator system has been chosen. It is a connected generator on the AC bus ( Figure 16 & Figure 17).

Criteria for Evaluating the Technical and Economic Performance of the System
As part of this study, the indicators of economic viability, technical reliability and environmental impact have been used as criteria for evaluating the technical and economic performance of the system.

Economic Viability Indicator
The cost of the life cycle is taken as an indicator of optimizing and evaluating the economic performance of the Elokato Village Micro-Network System. To assess the economic benefits, the operating costs of the system, and the initial and replacement costs have been taken into account. In the Homer approach, the cur-  The equilibrium grid extension distance is the distance from the grid that makes the current net cost of extending the grid equal to the current net cost of the autonomous system. Further away from the network, the autonomous system is optimal. Closer to the grid, the extension of the grid is optimal.
HOMER calculates the break-even extension distance using the following eq-

Indicator of Technological Reliability
The fraction of capacity shortage or capacity insufficiency is chosen as an indicator to assess the technological reliability performance of the micro-grid. The capacity shortage fraction is the ratio between the total shortage and the total demand for electricity, this value must be between 0 and 1. The technological reliability of the system is high when this ratio tends towards 0. In our case of study a maximum of 5% has been set as a target (Figure 18).
The calculation of the value of the capacity shortage is done with the following The life of the project has been set at 25 years, with an annual real interest rate of 5.88, which is used to calculate discount factors and annualized costs from net current costs [11].
In HOMER, two main storage system management strategies are used to administer the operation of the generator set and battery bank when there is a shortage of renewable energy production to meet the load: duty cycle (CC) and monitoring. load (LF).
• For the Load Following (LF) strategy, whenever the generator set is running, Smart Grid and Renewable Energy only the power needed for charging (demand) can be generated and the battery bank cannot be charged. • For the cyclic charging (CC) strategy, the generator set will operate at maximum capacity and the excess power generated will be used to charge the battery bank [11].
The strategy adopted in this study is LF (load monitoring), which means that the batteries would be charged by the PV field, the wind turbine and the tidal turbine only by the excess of production after satisfaction of demand by the system. The diesel generator will be mobilized only in the event of a production deficit of the subsystem (PV, Wind, Tidal) and of the battery park to avoid consuming fuel and generating polluting emissions for the environment.

Simulation Results
HOMER modeled microgrids with different configurations to achieve the most cost effective and cost effective strategy, using component sizing inputs. Table 1 lists the optimization results categorized according to different configurations for the stand-alone system. Table 1 provides the results for the grid connected microgrid system. All results were ordered according to a decrease in TNPC.
After the various simulations HOMER identified 13 scenarios and configurations deemed to be the most profitable, from the parameters entered for the initial architecture as part of this study, the results were ordered in decreasing order of value of NPC and COE; these data are shown in Figure 19.

Discussion of the Grid Extension distance at Equilibrium: Mini-Grid versus Interconnected Grid
In electricity sector development strategy, a master plan dedicated to rural electrification has been drawn up by the Ministry of Energy.
The cost of the PDER (Rural Electrification Master Plan) is given in Table 2 for the 2015-2020 baseline scenario [2].
The Figure above shows that the cost of the breakeven point of extending the power grid compared to the two hybrid systems analyzed. For the hybrid PV/wind/diesel/hydropower system is profitable if the distance from the village to the transformer station is greater than 1.90 km.

Conclusions
The approach of maximizing environmental, economic and technological benefits is the one favored in feasibility studies for decentralized mini-power grids.
In our case study, after the various simulations, HOMER identified 13 scenarios and configurations deemed to be the most profitable, from the parameters