Solar DC Nanogrids - A Promising Low-cost Approach to Village Electrification

Solar DC Nanogrids - A Promising Low-cost Approach to Village Electrification

Presenter: Timothy Wash (Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, SERIS)

Presentation

More than a billion people worldwide still do not have access to basic modern energy services such as electric lighting in their homes. Most of these people live in remote rural areas, which makes extension of national electric grids to meet their needs prohibitively expensive. Several solutions involving solar photovoltaic electricity generation, such as solar lanterns, solar home systems (SHS), and solar (AC) mini-grids are being actively pursued to address the energy requirements of these people. These current solutions each have certain limitations, such as high cost for the cases of minigrids and solar home systems, or limited functionality and expandability in the case of solar lanterns. This work describes an approach to rural electrification – solar DC nano-grids – which attempts to address these limitations by providing basic energy services at lowest possible cost, while using a system architecture which is expandable and future-proof.

References

Timothy Wash (Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, SERIS): Micro Perspective for Decentralized Energy (MES) 2015, Bangalore, India.