Comparative Assessment of Electrical Generating Systems for a Greek Island

This master thesis is the last part of the master studies in the department of Energy Management and Sustainability, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. This work has been performed in collaboration with the company Renenig Energy, in Athens. The reader should note that the report is an academical work. Results and conclusion are influenced by hypothesis and should not be taken as general truths. The case study is a fictive project but it is composed of values adapted from another real but confidential project, which makes the analysis plausible. The owner of a private island in Greece wants to build a luxury resort on his island. Therefore, he will also need an electrical generating system that must cover the future electricity demand. Usually, diesel generators are used in remote areas in order to produce electricity. However, this technology is very expensive, and harmful for the environment. This master thesis covers the estimation of the electricity demand and the technico-economical assessment of different energy systems. The objective is to evaluate the potential of a microgrid composed of different renewable energy technologies and compare it to the a baseline system composed of generators only. The hourly electricity demand of the entire island has been modeled using a bottom-up approach with a list of representative types of locals. The consumption of these locals have been divided into three categories : The appliances, the lighting and the heating/cooling. For the energy system which must produce electricity, supply strategies have been defined based on the type of technology. For all strategies, an optimization of the technology installed capacities is performed with the software HOMERPro. It is used as a tool to minimize the net present cost of the energy system and analyze the microgrid energetic behavior. The yearly electricity demand of the island has been estimated to around 11 GWh, with a peak load of 2,5 MW during the summer. The cost of serving this load with generators is $63 million with a levelized cost of electricity of 0.467$/kWh. When integrating solar panels, the system cost decreases to $51.3 million with a LCOE of 0.378$/kWh. Moreover, wind turbines and a battery storage system are also economically viable. The last strategy consists of distributed PV panels on building roofs, wind turbines and a battery storage system. Results show that this energy system can decrease the cost to $ 39.8 million while emitting half of the carbon dioxide compared with the baseline system. However, the battery bank has a large impact on CO2 emissions due to its manufacturing processes. Further work can be done for this case study, especially on the network stability assessment, which was not part of this master thesis. Moreover, the potential of implementing hydrogen in the microgrid could be interesting. This could bring a good storage alternative to batteries.