Abstract:
An escalating energy demand can be seen especially in developing and fast-growing economies
such as India. Conventional energy resources meet most of the energy demand. The alarming issue of global
warming and the dependency on fossil fuels to meet the energy demand has motivated the use of clean
energy sources. In this context, the educational institutions with high electricity consumption in India have
been planning to opt for locally available renewable energy sources to meet their electricity demand. Even
one of the most crucial issues in such academic institutions is the food waste management. Most of the
institutes, give up their food wastage to piggeries which are directly fed to animals or discarded or dumped
irrationally. In this paper, an optimal microgrid solution using locally available energy resources for a
real physical location considering its real time-power demand is proposed. Various scenarios and different
combinations of energy sources, such as solar photovoltaic, food waste based biogas plant, and a diesel
generator as backup have been considered along with batteries as storage in off-grid and grid-connected
systems. Hybrid optimization of multiple electric renewables (HOMER) PRO software package is utilized
for detailed technical and nancial analysis with a multiyear growth approach to determine the optimal
energy system, which is unlikely observed in literature so far. The detailed analysis results illustrate that
photovoltaic contributes most of the electricity being generated in all the scenarios. The renewable fraction
is comparatively high in the off-grid system in the range of 92% to 100% as compared with 63% to 80%
in grid-connected systems. The results obtained also show that levelized cost of electricity is low in case
of grid-connected systems varying between 0.18 Indian National Rupee (INR)/kWh to 1.39 INR/kWh in
contrast to 11.96 INR/kWh to 18.47 INR/kWh for off-grid systems.
