Design of Solar, Batteries and Diesel Hybrid Power System for Telecommunications Applications

Abstract

In the world twenty two percent of populations live without electricity. Many of these people live in remote areas where decentralized generation is the only method of electrification. Most mini-grids are powered by diesel generators, but new hybrid power systems are becoming a reliable method to incorporate renewable energy while also reducing total system cost. The aims of this research were to study and design the hybrid Solar, Batteries and Diesel system applied for Direct Current (DC) telecommunication load to combined different power sources in one system with best performance and efficiency. Most of the existing system works with hybrid diesel-batteries only that had a lot of problems especially with the costly batteries. In this study Photo Voltaic (PV) module is added with electronic Max Power Point Tracker (MPPT) to the system with site controller that will manage the PV, batteries, and diesel generator to secure the needed power for the critical telecommunication load. Comparison between hybrid Solar, batteries and Diesel system in term of system design and performance is done using data coming from the real site. The results are compared with the simulation results. The simulation was done by using MATLAB/SIMULINK and the system was divided to five sub systems. The sub systems showing PV system, DC-DC converter system, battery system, Diesel generator and rectifier sub system and the telecommunication load sub system. Finally, we can say that there was good agreement achieved between the theoretical simulation and the real-time measurement taken from the telecommunication site. We can consider this solution very effective for small scale application not only for telecommunication sites.