Performance evaluation of rural microgrids
Student name: Mr Pradeep Kumar Saini
Guide: Dr Naqui Anwer
Year of completion: 2017
Host Organisation: Customized Energy Solutions India Pvt. Ltd.
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Debi Prasad Dash
Abstract: More than 237 million people in India do not have access to electricity (IEA, 2015) and out of which
more than 90% of these individuals live in rural parts of India. A major portion of this population
could be electrified with the help of AC/DC minigrids and off-grid solutions. The next problem of
the pyramid is with the number that is already electrified and yet in a poor state of electrical health.
Out of the 850 million rural population of India, there would be a considerable 300 to 400 million
population with electricity supply of even less than 8 hours; and that would also be a big population
which can take power through off-grid systems. Hence off-grid systems such as microgrids or
minigrids have the huge potential to play a key role in the rural electrification of India. But before
that it is very important to understand how these systems are performing at this point of time. As per
the discussions with the experts working in the fields, there is no concrete data available on operation
of these microgrids and hence it is very difficult to quantify how these systems are performing at this
point of time. As per the technical audits performed by different experts working in the field, it has
been observed that these microgrids are highly in-efficient in terms of providing the output. And this
efficiency is not just because of ill performance of a particular equipment but as a system overall or
due to the ill-design of system. Even I have also observed the same thing during my technical audit
conducted at Gram Oorja’s microgrid site in darewadi, where I have found that the installed capacity
of the solar panels is highly oversized as per the load demand and the installed capacity of the battery
is slightly undersized and also it does not have even one day of autonomy. Further during the
analysis, it has been observed that the battery is also sulphated and it is hardly operating at 50 % of
its capacity.
During this study various root causes of the poor performance or the failures of minigrids have been
identified and out of which poor performance of the battery is the key reason for the failure of power
plants. Periodic preventive maintenance is necessary to avoid the issues related with the batteries
especially in case of all type of lead acid batteries.
As per the discussions with various stakeholders working in the field, it has been realized that
monitoring of plant is necessary for getting the better outputs, and there have been success stories
where remote monitoring has helped couple of companies to arrive at better decisions not only
technically but commercially also they have improved their operations. And in case of rural
minigrids, remote monitoring becomes necessary for the optimum performance of the plants because
they are not very much easily accessible. And the brains who have designed these kind of microgrids
would basically make them better are generally not sitting in villages. They are generally sitting in
cities or somewhere else and they need to see data and analyze it on a regular basis. As per Smart
power India (SPI), if you want this minigrid sector to grow and perform properly, remote monitoring
is must and since they are in this field for 2 to 3 years, they have identified this as a major problem
and you cannot just rely on the manual monitoring data.
