Design and analysis of a stand-alone renewable hybrid power system for telecom Base Transceiver Station: In East Bale, Ethiopia

Abstract

Communication services have faced several challenges to provide consistent mobile network service at remote locations where reliable power supply is not available. This paper presents the solution to utilizing a hybrid of wind and photovoltaic (PV) solar power system with a backup battery to provide feasible and reliable electric power for a specific remote mobile base station located at East Bale Zone, Ethiopia. All the necessary configuration, simulation, and techno economic evaluation carried out using Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER Pro) software. The best optimal system configurations namely PV/Battery and wind/PV/Battery hybrid systems compared with the conventional stand-alone dual diesel generator (DG) system. Findings indicated that PV/Battery hybrid system is the most economically viable option with a total cost of $190,340.00 for the whole system project life time, i.e. 25 years and for the dual diesel generator system the total cost is $3,422,719 for the whole system project life time. And the levelized cost of energy (COE) for both systems is $0.374/kWh and $8.454/kWh respectively. This implies the hybrid system saves $3,232,379.00 in terms of NPC and $8.08/kWh in terms of COE and have 9,636kwh/year electric production benefit to the network operator. Also, simulation results show that the renewable energy source based hybrid energy system can decrease amount of air pollutants as compared to the conventional dual diesel generator only configuration by reduction of 40,102kg/year of CO2, 99 kg/year of CO, 11 kg/year of UHC, 7.46 kg/year of PM, 80.5kg/year of SO2, and 883 kg/year of NO2 observed and saves about 29,200 liters of fuel per site per annual to the network operator. So that, it helps telecom to provide reliable network service and reduce fuel consumption, transportation cost & CO2 emissions through proper power solution analysis using this Result.