Paper Info
Title
Fish and Chips: Converting Fishing Boats for Electric Mobility to Serve as Minigrid Anchor Loads
Abstract
Though electricity access remains out of reach for roughly one billion primarily rural and low-income people, crucial strides have been made in developing new pathways for connecting households and businesses to electricity supplies. Among these, decentralized minigrids - typically comprised of generation, storage, and a medium- and low-voltage distribution network - have considerable technical promise for balancing recent advances in decentralized generation as well as grid sensing and communication systems with the overwhelming economies-of-scale enjoyed by electricity grids. However, low revenues and, in response, high tariffs necessary for cost recovery stifle the widespread development of this promising pathway for electrification. In this paper, we study techniques for addressing the principal challenge for sustainable minigrids: demand stimulation among rural customers. Specifically, we evaluate the potential for conversion of diesel-based fishing boats in Lake Victoria to electric motor and battery-based systems that can provide a crucial anchor load for a nascent 650 kWp hybrid solar-battery-diesel minigrid. We conduct a survey among fishing boat operators (n = 69) to characterize the target population and deploy a custom tracking system to measure fishing boat movement patterns. Using these primary data along with secondary data on customer consumption, we select a candidate electric mobility system, create synthetic loads of residential and business customers, and construct technical and financial models of the complete minigrid system. We then use these models to evaluate the excess capacity on the minigrid for electric boats, evaluate the tradeoffs among electric mobility and manufacturing on the minigrid, and assess the impacts of demand response capabilities for charging the boats. We find that electric boat charging contributes to at least 17% more consumption per day resulting in substantial technical as well as financial value to the minigrid system, though perhaps at the cost of additional use of the system's backup diesel generator. We find that adding shifting capabilities to electric boat charging can save up to 6% of diesel expenditures at little to no impact on the system Net Present Value. We combine these minigrid-scale evaluations with design considerations for a future boat tracking system, providing guidance for minigrid designers and operators to incorporate the potentially attractive load class of electric mobility systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3396851.3397687
e-Energy '20: The Eleventh ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems Virtual Event Australia June, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-8009-6
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
June Lukuyu100.34
Aggrey Muhebwa200.34
Jay Taneja367265.60