Electricity Cost Minimization for A Low-Income Household: A South African Case Study

The recent economic trajectory in South Africa has impacted many low-income household families. This has been because of high inflation, load-shedding, and unemployment. Many families are enabled to afford the cost of electricity. This further deteriorates the liberation of the majority in the country. In this paper, a technique based on genetic algorithm (GA) for a hybrid energy system for cost minimization is proposed. The technique is aimed at minimizing the cost of electricity by optimization the operation use of both the photovoltaic (PV) solar and wind energy (WE) systems tied into the power distribution grid. The results obtained show that by using the GA technique for optimizing the operation a decrease of 48.8% in summer and 35.6% in winter was achieved.