The few thousand people living in Dharanai—a small village in Bihar, India—still remember the night when the electric bulbs flickered and lit the village homes for the first time. A 100 kW solar-powered microgrid brought electric power to 450 homes, 60 street lights, and a few busi- nesses in the village. In another part of the world, a row of solar panels and a wind turbine attached to a hybrid microgrid (an inverter and a storage battery that is normally found in an electric car) enabled Olos- ho-Oibo—a small Kenyan hamlet—to experience the power of electricity. The small hybrid grid supplied enough electric power to run a dispensary serving 8000 plus people in and around the village, a school, and a church. Jyothi Mahalingam shows how the dependable microgrids are slowly changing the lives of the rural people globally.
Worldwide demand for electric energy is growing due to increase in population and economic growth. Access to electric power has become an important element in the social and economic development of a country. But, millions of people still live in dark due to steep installation costs and constraints in extending conventional power grid to remote locations. According to ‘World Energy Outlook 2015’, a report published by International Energy Agency, globally nearly 1201 million people, that is, 17% of the world population, still live without connectivity to electricity. The sub-Saharan Africa leads the table with 634 million people, followed by developing Asian countries with 526 million (in which India accounts for 237 million), and Latin American and Middle East countries each with 22 million and 17 million, respectively, people.
During the last two decades, global electric power generation, delivery, and consumption have undergone significant changes. Rise in demand keeps the power segment dynamic, showing spectacular growth. But, existing old grids are unable to cope-up with the surge in power loads and suffer from frequent outages; also, extreme weather vagaries often cripple their functioning. Such regular power interruptions disrupt manufacturing sector leading to huge economic loss. The top-down radial grid architecture that supplies power from a centralized power plant is becoming obsolete. Also, in wake of global warming, there is a paradigm shift in use of carbon- emitting centralized coal- and oil-using power plants. The grid is slowly getting replaced by localized systems known as microgrids. The microgrids, while providing right solution to sudden power outages, also address concerns about the power quality and reliability issues faced by centralized grid system.
About Microgrids
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