Hybrid Renewable System based Pumped Energy Storage for the Electrification of Rural Areas

The expansion of renewable energy resources in the rural areas of Sarawak is a substantial possibility and the potential use of energy storage is massive. For economic and reliability purposes, it is desirable for these facilities to be incorporated to form hybrid solar-pumped hydro storage system. The main objective of this paper is to study the concept of Photovoltaics (PV) pumped storage hydropower and the possibility for implementation of such technology in the rural areas of Sarawak, aiming to model off-grid micro-hybrid system that can continuously supply the load demand. The proposed system contains solar PV with pumped hydro energy storage reservoir which has been modelled using MATLAB Simulink. Different scenarios have been considered in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The results show that the reliability of the system during the uncertainty condition can be achieved using the pumped hydro storage.