Hybrid renewable energy supply for rural healthcare facilities: An approach to quality healthcare delivery (original) (raw)
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This paper takes a cursory look at the problem of inadequate power supply in the rural healthcare centres of a developing country, specifically Nigeria, and proffers strategies to address this issue through the design of hybrid renewable energy systems combined with the existing unreliable grid in order to meet the healthcare load demand, thus ensuring higher reliability of available energy sources. The simulations, analysis and results presented in this paper are based on meteorological data and the load profiles of six selected locations in Nigeria, using which hybrid grid-connected systems integrating diesel, solar and wind energy sources are designed with configurations to give optimum output. The optimised design configurations in the considered case study, Ejioku, Okuru-Ama, Damare-Polo, Agbalaenyi, Kadassaka and Doso, produce very low energy costs of of 0.0791 /kWh,0.115/kWh, 0.115 /kWh,0.115/kWh, 0.0874 /kWh,0.0754/kWh, 0.0754 /kWh,0.0754/kWh, 0.0667 /kWhand0.0588/kWh and 0.0588 /kWhand0.0588/kWh, respectively, leveraging solar and win...
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