Minigrid Clusters for Rural Electrification in Ethiopia

Many villages in Ethiopia are remote and still not connected to the national electric grid. Minigrids utilizing the locally available renewable energy resources are proposed to provide electricity to such villages. Therefore, minigrids have been designed utilizing the solar photovoltaic and micro-hydro generation plants, along with some battery energy storage system. The grids are designed and first investigated as individual mini-grids. Afterwards, a minigrid cluster is developed by connecting the minigrids with the help of interconnecting feeders. Thus, sharing of generation and energy storage systems among different minigrids in the cluster is facilitated. The minigrid cluster is modelled and simulated to corroborate that the sharing of the resources and the battery energy storage systems in the individual minigrids improve frequency stability.