Contribution to electric energy generation for isolated rural areas using second life components and renewable energies : practical feasibility and life cycle analysis
Contribution à la production d'énergie électrique pour les zones rurales isolées utilisant composants de seconde vie et énergies renouvelables : faisibilité pratique et analyse du cycle de vie
Résumé
The ever growing demand for electricity has always been a burden which has continued to inspire the need for development and evaluation of new sources for generating electricity. Asides the current challenge of high cost, the effect of ecological footprint and the global warming concerns have further made deployment of novel ideas a bit more difficult. The possibility of adapting a reuse solar-pico hydro energy generation system to a rural apartment for economic and ecological advantage was the key motivation for this thesis. This reuse system was made from old materials and e-waste components such as old lead acid batter, power supply unit from desktop computer an old induction machine and so on. This thesis thus answers three main research questions; is it feasible to apply and deploy the reuse system based on available e-waste components and second life materials? Is the reuse system efficient and adaptable to the energy needs of a typical rural household? Is the environmental impact contribution of the reuse system smaller than that of a new system over the same lifetime? The investigations commenced by exploring the effect of deploying the reuse system on electricity access. A load model was developed for a typical rural household taking a case study in Nigeria while optimal component sizing was done based on the developed load model for both the reuse and new systems. Techno-economic analysis was performed and a comparison between the new system and the reuse system indicated about 65% and 15% decrease in the initial capital cost and cost of energy respectively. From the sizing results, three different possible scenarios of combining old solar panels and the reuse hydro turbine were presented and further analyses were done based on these scenarios. Afterwards, a feasibility study of adopting the reuse system in Nigeria based on annually generated e-waste within the country was performed. The results showed that an average of about 127 thousand households can be electrified annually if the reuse solar-pico hydro generation system was adopted for energy generation in households. The second phase of the research was to develop a battery energy management algorithm to ensure maximum power supply to the loads irrespective of weather conditions and load demand. To achieve this, an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) algorithm was developed for forecasting solar irradiance vis-a-vis a battery energy management algorithm incorporating a combination of load shifting and load curtailment. The application of the energy management algorithm successfully reduced the possibility of having zero battery state of charge during a typical rainy day by 82%. After achieving a desirable energy management for the reuse system, the last step was to evaluate the environmental impact contribution of the system as compared to a new hybrid system of a similar configuration. To achieve this, life cycle assessment was performed with the aid of Simapro software and EcoInvent database. The ISO 14040/44 standard was strictly adhered to and the result indicated that for the reuse system, only six out of the fifteen impact categories had significantly visible impact scores. The normalised impact score for all the impact categories were less than 0.005 Daily Adjust Life Years (DALY) with aquatic acidification and eutrophication having zero impacts score. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was performed to see the influence of critical parameter on the environmental impact contribution. This revealed that battery lifetime was the most sensitive parameter which resulted in the highest change in impact contribution when varied. In conclusion, this thesis has proven the technical, economic, and ecological advantage of adopting the reuse solution for rural electrification.
La demande croissante en électricité constitue depuis toujours un défi. Développer de nouvelles sources de production d’énergie durables dévient une nécessité et un enjeu sociétal majeur afin de diminuer l’empreinte carbone du secteur. La principale motivation de cette thèse réside dans la possibilité d'adapter un système de production d'énergie solaire-pico hydraulique de deuxième vie, réutilisé à partir de composants électroniques. Ce système a été conçu en utilisant des matériaux réutilisés et des composants issus de déchets électroniques tels que des batteries au plomb, une source d'alimentation d'un ordinateur, une vieille machine à induction, etc. La thèse explore trois questions clés: est-il faisable d'appliquer et de mettre en œuvre le système de seconde vie en se basant sur des déchets électroniques? Le système de réutilisation est-il efficace et adaptable aux besoins énergétiques d'un ménage rural standard ? L'impact environnemental du système de réutilisation est-il inférieur à celui d'un nouveau système sur la même durée de vie ?
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|