Browsing by Subject "Decentralized energy systems"

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Open Access
A planar facility location–allocation problem with fixed and/or variable cost structures for rural electrification
(2023-06) Akbaş, Beste; Kocaman, Ayşe Selin
One major impediment to developing countries’ economic growth is the lack of access to affordable, sustainable, and reliable modern energy systems. Even today, hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas and do not have access to essential electricity services. In this study, we present a planar facility location–allocation problem for planning decentralized energy systems in rural development. We consider nano-grid and micro-grid systems to electrify rural households. While micro-grids serve multiple households with a common generation facility, nano-grids are small-scale systems serving individual consumers. The households served by micro-grids are connected to the generation facilities with low-voltage cables, for which we employ a distance limit constraint due to technical concerns, including power loss and allowable voltage levels. In this problem, we minimize the total investment cost that consists of the facility opening and the low-voltage cable costs. In order to capture the diversity of cost structures in renewable energy investments, we consider three versions of the objective function where we incorporate different combinations of fixed and variable cost components for facilities. For this problem, we provide mixed-integer quadratically constrained problem formulations and propose model-based and clustering-based heuristic approaches. Model-based approaches are multi-stage, in which we solve the discrete counterparts of the problem and employ alternative selection methods for the candidate facility locations. Clustering-based approaches utilize faster clustering techniques to identify the type and location of the facilities. We conduct computational experiments on real-life instances from villages in Sub-Saharan Africa and perform a comparative analysis of the suggested heuristic approaches.
Open Access
A planar facility location-allocation problem with fixed and variable cost structures for rural electrification
(2021-06) Akbaş, Beste
One of the major impediments to the economic development of developing coun-tries is the lack of access to aﬀordable, sustainable, and reliable modern energy systems. Even today, hundreds of millions of people, most of whom live in ru-ral areas, do not have access to essential electricity services. In this study, we present a planar facility location-allocation problem for the planning of decentral-ized energy systems in the context of rural development. We consider nano-grid and micro-grid systems to electrify the rural households. While micro-grids serve multiple households with a common generation facility, nano-grids are small-scale systems serving individual consumers. The households served by micro-grid fa-cilities are connected to the generation point with low voltage cables, for which we employ a distance limit constraint due to the technical concerns, including the power loss and allowable voltage levels. In this problem, we minimize the total investment cost that consists of the facility opening and the low voltage connec-tion costs. Additionally, given the diversity of cost structures in the renewable energy investments, we provide three diﬀerent formulations where we incorpo-rate diﬀerent combinations of ﬁxed and variable cost components for facilities. For this problem, we provide a mixed integer quadratically constrained problem formulation and propose six heuristic approaches. The three of these heuristic methods are multi-stage approaches in which we solve optimization models, while the other methods utilize faster clustering techniques that have been extensively studied in the literature. We conduct computational experiments on the synthetic data and real life instances from the small villages in Sub-Saharan Africa, and perform a comparative analysis of the suggested heuristic approaches.