Optimal Modeling of off-grid Renewable Energy Systems for Rural Electrification in Bangladesh

The paper presents optimal modeling of three models using various renewable energy sources for electrifying rural houses in Bangladesh, Where nearly 72% of the population live in rural areas. The rural people are experiencing an acute shortage of electric power that is likely to be worsening day by day. Therefore, renewable energy is considered to be the promising choice for providing clean energy to these remote settlements. In this paper, a village named Goalpara is chosen which is located in Sirazganj district, Bangladesh. The available resources like solar and biomass have been identified. The optimization has been performed by using the Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER) software. A comparative study has been achieved based on net present cost (NPC) and the cost of energy (COE) among three models which includes solar PV, biomass and hybrid system.