Microgrid in George Washington, Cuba

Sammanfattning: Cuba has vast natural resources for domestic renewable energy generation, but their energy mix is heavily dominated by fossil fuels. This contributes to a high dependence on expensive oil imports and has led to significant generation shortfalls, which in turn has resulted in extensive power outages and serious fuel crises. Additionally, large amounts of CO2 emissions are generated from power generation based on oil or gas. George Washington is a small industrial town in the Villa Clara province in Cuba that frequently experiences these problems. It holds a rum factory, a sugar mill, and a small residential area containing 710 households. The implementation of a microgrid utilizing the available solar, wind, and biomass potential could work to simultaneously reduce the town's dependence on energy imports, increase the renewable electricity share, and increase self-sufficiency of the electricity demand, enabling the industries and residential area to access energy services even when the national grid is not delivering power. By examining different potential microgrid configurations in HOMER Pro, an optimal system was decided based on cost parameters such as CAPEX and NPV, the self-sufficiency share of the electricity consumed, and the available potential to utilize domestic natural resources as well as the available workforce able to operate such a system. Because of Cuba's difficulties in accessing investment capital, a low CAPEX, high self-sufficiency index, and a high NPV was considered the best possible system. The scenario that best correlated with this outcome was the Middle Road scenario. By considering the area limiations of George Washington, one model run of the Middle Road scenario produced a system with additional solar PV (2.9 MW) and wind capacity (9.2 MW) paired with the already existing 6 MW of bagasse-fired CHP capacity in the sugar mill and 688 kW of solar PV capacity. It had a low investment cost of $34 million USD, a high NPV at $112 million USD, and a self-sufficiency index at 91.33%. Another model run of the Middle Road scenario that didn't take avaliable area into consideration produced a microgrid with an additional 43.1 MW of wind capacity. This model run had an NPV of $292 million USD, an investment cost of $79 million USD, and a self-sufficiency index of 94%. By implementing more capacity than this in the 100% Self-sufficient scenario, the self-sufficiency index reached a maximum of 100%, but had a lower NPV at $282 million USD, and a much higher investment cost of $1.324 billion USD. These scenarios only used biomass, solar, or wind energy for microgrid electricity generation, and therefore only consumed fossil fuels when importing electricity from the grid.