Hybrid PV-Biomass Power Plant design for an Indonesian village

Abstract: This thesis work focuses on the design of a hybrid PV-Gasification-Battery plant for a remote villagelocated on an Indonesian island and currently not electrified. As the objective of the study is to assess therelevance of the hybrid plant to make use of the local resources to satisfy the demand, the village situationis analyzed, and a representative load curve is built. The consumption of the whole village whose 3000households mainly live from fishing is assumed to reach 13.3 MWh/day by the plant year 10, peaking at920 kW at 6 pm. The local situation study raises important issues such as deforestation, lack of drinkablewater and food conservation solutions. This project not only intends to bring electricity access but adoptsan integrated and innovative approach to best serve the local needs and address the above-mentionedissues. This is why virtuous practices such as polygeneration with cooling, ice and clean water productionor load shaving are embraced. To determine its optimal sizing and behavior, a modelling of the plant isdeveloped, with a specific focus on the gasification plant operation and technical limits, and simulationsare carried out. The scenario in which the gasification plant runs at half load during the day while all thephotovoltaic power available is injected proves to be the best one as it engenders a smooth power curvewith a limited peak and a balanced ratio biomass/solar in energy. As for the optimal sizing, it is found tohave respective PV, gasification and storage capacities of 1600 kWpeak, 450 kW and 1274 kWh. It isdefined as optimal with regards to its performance on the three main criteria, introduced to make sure thataffordability, reliability and environmental sustainability remain at the core of the project. Indeed, theLevelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is the lowest of all simulations and remains in the range of tariffsevoked by the Indonesian energy distributor PLN for Power Purchase Agreements in off-grid areas with141$/MWh, the 5%-minimum criterion is met for the share of blackout and the plantation size remainsreasonable with less than 50 hectares required. This configuration is finally compared to other hybridsolutions, both the association of PV and batteries and the PV-genset-storage solution boast higherLCOE with 286 and 157$/MWh respectively.