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Power outages and supply reliability issues are still a very common occurrence in many parts of the country. These power outages can be especially detrimental to the operational cost of consumers located remote areas where redundancy of distribution feeders are low. Such consumers are to rely on diesel generator sets for continuous availability of supply with fuel costs contributing to a significant share of their operational cost. People who cannot afford back up facilities face losses due to business interruption due to power outage. The supply code of almost none of the utility companies in the country have provision to compensate for these outages. Renewable Energy along with battery storage has a significant role to play providing clean and prolonged backup power while also reducing the operational costs of consumers by reducing the diesel fuel consumption. However, in the current scenario of increased costs of battery storage systems these systems are not economically feasible. The study demonstrates the factors that contribute to sizing the system for the lowest lifetime cost for providing backup power in outage scenarios. Outages can be largely of two types. Random outages of short duration which occur due to faults or equipment failure and also outages which can last for several days due to the impact on grid infrastructure from adverse weather conditions.
The study points to the fact that there are significant benefits that are associated with operation of Renewable Energy systems with storage in conjunction with a diesel generator like savings in fuel cost. The various parameters influencing the cost of Back up systems based on REHS are analyzed in the study using the HOMER Grid Software. The software allows the modelling of resilience and reliability that can be provided by Behind-the-Meter REHS. The results obtain by the study show that these models are economically as per the simulated conditions but lowers the system cost as compared with conventional generation and thus highlights that effective incentivizing mechanisms for resilience can be incorporated for making these models feasible.
