Renewable energy supply of refugee camps to decrease fuel consumption and CO2 emissions

Due to existing conflicts or natural disasters in many different parts of the world, refugee camps are established by different aid organizations in order to provide local humanitarian assistance. Nowadays, these camps are electrically supplied using diesel generators, which are not environmentally friendly and require huge amounts of not easily available fossil fuels. In this sense, Microgrids (MGs) may have an opportunity to provide efficient electrical energy including renewable energy resources. In this paper a refugee camp located in Juba, South Sudan was selected as simulation example. First, the proposed MG to replace the current refugee camp topology and to supply the required electric and heat power is presented. The MG here considered is composed of different commercially available technologies. An economic study of the benefit using this grid configuration is carried out in order to determine the fuel consumption savings due to the use of renewable energy resources based generation technologies. Then, the replacement of diesel by photovoltaic and wind generation results in a reduced system inertia which brings problems related to frequency stability. A control strategy derived from the equations of a synchronous machine is here used to operate converter-coupled units in order to improve the MG frequency stability.