Power-Electronic Loss Modeling and Analysis of DC Microgrids for Rural Electrification

Electricity access is a fundamental human right that reduces poverty, enhances living standards, and increases socioeconomic opportunities. Globally millions of people are deprived of their right to access electricity, among which around 80% of them belong to rural regions in remote areas. Rural electrification through DC Islanded microgrids is a promising solution to energy poverty. In this paper, an islanded DC microgrid consisting of multiple houses is modeled for rural electrification. A detailed distribution and conversion loss modeling and analysis is performed for centralized and distributed microgrid architectures using the bus injection method and modified Newton-Raphson power flow method. The centralized architecture has generation and storage centralized while the loads are distributed. Alternatively, the distributed architecture has generation, storage, and loads distributed at each household. A comparative power system and power electronic loss analysis for both architectures show that distributed architectures have higher efficiency and lower losses than centralized. The same analysis can be performed on different microgrid architectures.