AbstractsPhysics

Electricity is an indispensable service for people and having access to electricity for everyone is an essential and significant livelihood project. In China, almost 99% of the total population has access to electricity. Approximately 36 million people’s electricity usage problem has been solved since 1998. The resolution approaches are to implement and extend the construction and transformation of rural power grid and national grid coverage. In 2006, the Chinese government invested about 4 billion dollars to implement the power construction projects and then 7 million people’s electricity usage problems were solved by the end of 2012. However, there are still more than 3 million people who do not have access to electricity. These people are extensively distributed in rural areas where it is difficult to extend the national and state grids due to high financial investment in constructing the grid. Most importantly, some of these areas do not have abundant renewable energy resources. It is not realistic to purely utilize renewable energy to solve the electricity usage issue in these areas. Therefore, hybrid stand-alone power supply systems (SAPS) tend to be a reliable operation to solve the electricity problem in off-grid areas. PEC624 Master of Science in Renewable Energy Dissertation In this dissertation, the feasibility of utilizing a hybrid SAPS system is elaborated to solve the electricity usage issue in off-grid areas. Hybrid SAPS systems researched in this project consists of PV modules, diesel generators, batteries, system controllers and regulators. The feasibility evaluation is based on four aspects: technical, environmental, economic and social. The project mainly focuses on off-grid villages and households in three provinces: Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang. The main method involved in this research is online and literature searching. The primary finding of this research is that hybrid SAPS system can be extensively used in remote areas in three targeted provinces, but the size and operating period of PV modules, diesel generators, batters and inverters is different in each villages and households. Moreover, living standard can be improved after system installation. It is recommended that diesel generators are required to be operated during extreme weather in three provinces. It is also recommended that large size batteries are required in areas with abundant solar resource because PV modules can produce more power than that working in areas with unsatisfactory solar resource.