Abstract:
Ethiopia is in Rapid Economic growth and the growth of the country depends on both urban
and rural areas growth. On the other hand the demand of Electric energy grow rapidly with
Economic growth. Today only 27.2% of the population have access to electricity and this
becomes a challenge for the further growth of the county especially for rural areas. An off-grid
hybrid energy system have been attracting to supply electricity to rural areas in all aspects like,
reliability, sustainability and environmental protections, especially for communities living far
in areas where grid extension is not appropriate.
The purpose of this thesis is to Design and simulate an off-Grid Fuzzy Logic Controller
Based Hybrid Biomass-Solar PV power generating system to electrify 200 households in pera
Village, Gumay woreda which is located 75 kilo meter west of Jimma,Ethiopia. The study
area has an average sunshine hour data of 7.05 hours per day and by using Angestron model
the sunshine hour data has converted to radiation data. Hence, the study area has an average
solar radiation of 5.38kwh/day. A ten year average of 1845 metric ton coffee husk biomass
resource has dumped without any economic advantage and it becomes a national waste. Since
the biomass resource becomes a national waste this study hybridized biomass with solar PV
as a primary source to supply electricity directly to the load and to charge battery bank when
excess generation is happened. The community’s load has been suggested for lighting, water
pumping, school and health clinic equipment load, television, radio, communal loads and
industrial loads. Accordingly, A load demand of 245.16kwh/day with a peak load of 38.85kw
was involved in the design and simulation of the power system.
In order to supply the load demand of the study area the contribution of biomass to solar PV
was 82.6% to 17.4%.The reason behind this contribution is the fact that biomass becomes a
waste for the community and this study needs to avoid its adverse environmental effect by
designing a biomass plant that utilizes 70% of the biomass resource.
Fuzzy logic controller has been used to decide the output power depending on the available
resource. To do this, the hybrid system was modeled on matlab/simulink and fuzzy rule have
been written on fuzzy logic rule editor. Then the rules has been loaded to the fuzzy logic
controller and simulation have been performed. On the simulation result, it is observed that
the fuzzy logic controller was able to control the available resource and supply to the load.
Finally, cost estimation has been performed using analytical method. Accordingly the total
life cycle cost of the system becomes $134,817.962.
