Abstract
Limited access to electricity in remote rural areas is one of the most challenging issues in Iraq. The utilization of renewable energy technologies for off-grid electricity generation has become an attractive option for minimizing the concerns of global warning and continuous depletion of fossil fuels. This work aims to study the techno-economic and environmental feasibility of using a PV/diesel/battery hybrid energy system to supply electricity for a remote rural village in Iraq. HOMER software is utilized to evaluate the optimization and the sensitivity analysis using a multi-input module by considering the effect of components degradation, load growth, and fuel price fluctuations on the performance of the system during the project lifetime. Results indicate that the most economical combination consists of a 12 kW PV, a diesel generator with a capacity of 20 kW, 15 batteries and a 6 kW power converter, at a net present cost of $ 162703. Moreover, the multi-year input variations have a considerable influence on system performance. The batteries show degradation of 24.2% by the end of their lifetime. Furthermore, among the project lifetime, PV production is reduced by 10% whilst diesel production is increased by 25.6% thereby increasing CO2 emission by 23.1%. Likewise, the sensitivity analysis on ambient temperature demonstrates that the PV and batteries are highly affected by temperature increment, which increases the annual output energy of batteries from 5496 kWh to 5871 kWh whilst reducing the lifetime of batteries from 26.5 months to 23.5 months and the annual PV production from 18268 kWh to 17332 kWh, which generally affects the economic performance of the system negatively.