Solar PV Electrification in Nigeria: Current Status and Affordability Analysis

Rural households represent, by far, the greater percentage of dwellings globally without access to the electricity supply. For reasons of low loads, distance from the grid and speed of deployment, distributed energy systems are now considered viable options for rural electrification. This paper presents the status of solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Nigeria and discusses the way forward for aggressive PV penetration in Nigeria’s energy mix, especially in rural communities. At present, distributed PV penetration in Nigeria is comparatively low based on the International Energy Association’s recommended PV market potential. This shows that there is a gap between the government’s policy targets and reality. The solar resource potential across the six geo-political zones in Nigeria is also presented, which ranges from 3.393 - 6.669 kWh/m2/day, with the Northern zones exhibiting better potentials over the Southern zones. It is shown that the levelised cost of electricity from PV system ranges from 0.387 - 0.475 $/kWh, whereas it is 0.947 US$/kWh and 0.559 US$/kWh for the diesel generator and glass-covered kerosene lamp, respectively. While this study shows that PV for rural household lighting is more affordable as compared to glass-covered kerosene lamps and fossil-fuelled generators for lighting, fiscal and energy policies for market creation are critical if PV systems are to deliver on their promise for rural electrification and climate change mitigation.

Optimal configuration strategy of energy storage system in high photovoltaic penetration micro-grid based on voltage sensitivity analysis

Energy storage is an effective measure to deal with internal power fluctuation of micro-grid and ensure stable operation, especially in the micro-grid with high photovoltaic(PV) penetration. Its capacity configuration is related to the steady, safety and economy of micro-grid.In order to improve the absorptive capacity of micro-grid on maximizing the use of distributed PV power in micro-grid, and improve the power quality, an optimal energy storage configuration strategy is proposed, which takes many factors into account, such as the topology of micro-grid, the change of irradiance, the load fluctuation and the cable. The strategy can optimize the energy storage allocation model to minimize the storage power capacity and optimize the node configuration.The key electrical nodes are identified by using the sensitivity coefficient of the voltage, and then the model is optimized to simplify calculation. Finally, an example of the European low-voltage micro-grid and a micro-grid system in the laboratory is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.The results show that the proposed method can optimize the allocation of capacity and the node of the energy storage system.