Renewable energy-based system for electrification of remote villages

Issues of energy crisis, continuous increase in energy demand as well as the population at geographically isolated locations motivate the researchers to find out suitable alternatives that can address these issues. Recently, locally available renewable energy sources-based systems have emerged as the possible options to fulfil the ever-increasing energy demand at such locations. Hence, under the present study, an attempt has been made to develop an off-grid integrated renewable energy system (IRES) to electrify the group of villages located in the Munsyari block of Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand state, India (30.36 N, 80.18 E). In this context, three distinct renewable resource cases have been considered to serve the hourly demand. A recently developed chimp optimization algorithm has been used to optimize the life cycle cost (LCC) and cost of energy (COE) for each case. The loss of power supply probability (LPSP) is considered as a constraint of energy reliability while optimizing the system. Finally, energy reliability-based sensitivity analysis is performed.