An Examination of the Techno-Economic Viability of Hybrid Grid-Integrated and Stand-Alone Generation Systems for an Indian Tea Plant

All tea plants in India rely on the national grid for their electrical needs and diesel for their thermal energy and transportation, which are encountering high costs, high emissions, and issues of accessibility. In this paper, hybrid renewable systems based on both standalone and grid-connected technologies have been modeled using HOMER Pro software for supplying power to a tea manufacturing plant in a typical rural area in India, namely, Gudalur village (Nilgiris), geographically located at 11°30.2′N and 76°29.5′E, which is presently run by the state grid to meet their energy requirements. The different configurations comprised of Solar PV, biomass, hydro, electrolyzer, boiler, thermal load controller to utilize excess electricity, and waste heat recovery options, and lead-acid batteries were designed to meet 650 kWh/day of electricity for processing units, 101 kWh/day of electricity for general applications, 4,450 kWh/day of thermal energy, and 86.35 kg/day of hydrogen energy. To determine the most feasible system design among various scenarios, several criteria such as NPC, COE, LCOH, and CO2 emission of the system have been investigated. In the case of off-grid hybrid systems, results show the highest NPC of $7.01 M with an LCOE of $1.06/kWh is obtained for the diesel generator/boiler/reformer/TLC system. It is reduced to $1.75 M with an LCOE of −$.420/kWh for the PV/biomass-CHP/hydro/TLC scenario. In a grid-connected system, the maximum NPC of $6.20 M with an LCOE of $0.835/kWh is obtained for a diesel generator/boiler system, and it is reduced to −$10.5 M with an LCOE of −$.240/kWh for the PV/biomass-CHP/hydro/TLC scenario. Additionally, in the off-grid systems, the PV/biomass-CHP/hydro/TLC system has LCOH of $4.27/kg, which is economical with the highest renewable fraction of 93%. The PV/biomass-CHP/hydro/TLC hybrid system has the lowest LCOH of −$64.5/kg with a maximum renewable fraction of 96% in on-grid systems. The findings show that recovering excess electricity and waste heat would increase renewable fraction, decrease the energy cost and emissions from the system, and emphasize the importance of TLC and CHP in HRES. According to the simulation results, the grid-connected system is more cost-effective than a stand-alone system due to the revenue obtained from selling renewable power to the grid.