Stand Alone 1-MW Microgrid for Remote locations of Armed Forces with PV-Battery-Diesel Generator
CPS Pasricha1, Rajeev Gupta2, Rahul Walawalkar3

1CPS Pasricha*, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India.
2Dr Rajeev Gupta, Department of Physics, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India.
3Dr. Rahul Walawalkar, Executive Director, IESA & President & MD, Customized Energy Solutions Pune, India.
Manuscript received on October 05, 2020. | Revised Manuscript received on October 10, 2020. | Manuscript published on October 30, 2020. | PP: 350-358 | Volume-10 Issue-1, October 2020. | Retrieval Number:  100.1/ijeat.A18681010120 | DOI: 10.35940/ijeat.A1868.1010120
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Abstract: : Many times, Armed Forces are deployed in bases in remote areas on the borders or Islands, which are far flung areas away from mainland. In many such cases, these areas do not have their power requirements through the main grid supply and entire power requirement of the deployment is supplied by diesel generators. These diesel generators have high environmental impact due to emission of greenhouse gases and are highly uneconomical as logistic sustenance of remote bases for supply of fuel is very challenging, Fossil fuel has to be supplied by vehicles, helicopters, boats or manually carried to hill tops. This increases the overall cost of deploying armed forces in remote areas. In recent years with the advancements in power electronic components and renewable energy, development in Microgrids (MGs) have shown a way to reduce dependency on main power grids. Hence, with the help of MGs, renewable energy can be used to fulfill power requirements of the armed forces deployed in remote places. In this work, a MG with capacity of 1MW has been designed keeping the special needs of armed forces as a major consideration. Solar power has been used as a primary renewable energy source in the proposed design. In order to mitigate the adverse effects of meteorological and extreme conditions on the solar power generation capacity, energy storage system in the form of batteries has also been provided. Batteries store power when excess power is generated from the photo voltaic (PV) system and discharge the power when power demand is higher than the PV generated power. Diesel generator sets have also been used to run critical loads, provide reliability and as backup to critical operations catering for outages, night time needs and un-expected meteorological conditions. MATLAB has been used to design and simulate the proposed MG. Working of the MG has also been demonstrated for varying meteorological and varying load conditions as well. The proposed design works satisfactory in all cases.
Keywords: Solar energy, battery, MG, diesel generator, voltage source inverter, PWM.