Proposal

I thought I'd add my master's project proposal to this blog to let you in on where I'm going to be going with this site:

Rural areas in South Africa face large challenges when it comes to electricity supply. Grid extension projects are time intensive and require a large capital investment. Non-grid electrification is an option in these areas, but must be sustainable and easily maintainable to give maximum energy supply efficiency for the area. As South Africa has a large amount of the resources needed for current renewable energy technology application, it has great potential for implementation of this kind. In addition to renewable energy techniques of energy generation being environmentally friendly, there is no necessity for fuels and therefore after initial capital investment, there are only minor operating costs associated with this. For rural environments, this is important. For non-grid electrification, different renewable energy technologies must be investigated to ascertain the most efficient and productive means of energy generation and distribution in each area to enable the area to be able to generate, store and distribute electricity and be come independent and self-sustainable. The implication of implementation of this scheme must then be considered.

This project has the objective of creating a tool for feasibility assessment and recommendations of renewable energy technologies in rural areas in South Africa. This would involve the development of a model which has a three-fold purpose, the first being to analyse information input about the demand area including population size, and load demand. As the load demand is variable, the maximum possible load must be calculated to ensure that the correct sizing of the system.

Using the data calculated from the above the second purpose of this tool can be executed. This is to consider renewable energy resources in the area and calculate the scheme that is best suited, in view of the energy demands calculated for that area. For the purposes of rural electrification, wind and solar renewable techniques are considered the most appropriate at this point in time as they are the most technologically mature options and have been proven in many applications and therefore the reliability of these methods are assured. Another aspect of this model would be energy storage. Because of the inherent intermittency of renewable energy techniques which are reliant on wind speed and irradiance levels, it is important to store energy when there is an excess and to be able to supply energy when there is insufficient being generated. The last aspect of this model would be a microgrid for the distribution of the energy generated. The tool would therefore take all these factors into account and model a system which met all these requirements based on the data obtained for the specified area.

Following initial model development, rural areas currently operating with off-grid electrification and renewable energy technology would be considered and assessed and the data collected used to refine the model created. Impacts of these schemes would then be assessed.

The model created would then be applied to a rural area within South Africa and recommendations made based on the scheme selected. Part of this project would involve outlining the implications of the implementation of the scheme, detailing skills needed, additional resources required, technologies to be used and possible difficulties foreseen.

So, that's where I'm going with this blog. Please let me know if there is anything that is unclear. As this is an initial proposal, there is the possibility that it will change over time as I discover more about each of these different areas and refine my ideas on them.