Techno-economic evaluation of rural electrification in Bolivia: lessons learned from the “El Espino” micro-grid

Abstract

© 2018 University of Minho. All rights reserved. In the last ten years, Bolivia has gone through a period of economic growth and political stability without precedent in its 200 hundreds years of history. The national government has the ambition to reach a 100 % of rural electrification coverage by 2025. One of the key components for this purpose is the construction and operation of isolated hybrid micro-grids. In order to test this technology a pilot plant was built in September 2015 in the rural village of ‘El Espino’.The objective of this study is the evaluation of the current operation strategy of this micro-grid and the implementation of the project. To that end, monitoring data is used, covering the period 1 of January of 2016 to 31 of july of 2017.The data analysis shows that the average PV efficiency is 9.34 %, the efficiency of the diesel generator is 31.4 % and the round trip efficiency of the battery is 74%. Using the data collected and the techno-economic information of the place, the operation cost of the system for the analyzed period is computed. Finally, an optimal dispatch model based in a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is used to find the optimal energy flows in the system that minimize the diesel consumption.