Goal 7 of the SDGs seeks to close the energy access gap and to avoid the worst impacts on environmental climate change and also to ensure affordable, reliable, and modern energy services for all by 2030 ( Closing the Energy Access Gap, 2020).
Also, energy production from conventional fossil fuels acts as a driver of climate change, accounting for about nearly 70% of overall global greenhouse gas emissions ( Sustainable development goals, 2020). As the target is 100% till 2030, the remaining 8% gap is achieved by sustainable development goal (SDG) 7 by 2030 ( Mawla and Khan, 2020). The global percentage of population with access to electricity increased from 83% in 2010 to 87% in 2015 and is estimated to reach 92% by the current rate till 2030. As the fossil fuel dependency has major drawbacks, India has been planning to entail its power capacity from 40% renewable sources till 2030 ( MNRE, 2018). Currently, India relies on 76% of coal as a sustainable and potential fuel for power generation ( Laha et al., 2020).
Hence, the existing poor service of power supply has been considered as a steady problem for rural locations in India ( Kumar et al., 2019). However, in India, approximately 18% of the population does not have the access to continuous and reliable power supply. Moreover, rather than basic residential loads, it requires electricity to pump water for machines to harvest crops, to run mills, etc. Rural areas are the backbone of India, which relies on agro sectors. Moreover, due to limited availability of fossil resources and increasing fuel prices, high grid extension investments are required ( Mamaghani et al., 2016). For scattered communities, grid extension is not economical and offers high transmission losses and light loading conditions. However, this arrangement remains the greatest challenge in rural areas to access electricity. The availability of grid facilities to connect the load is available for all places. Therefore, utilization of these fossil fuels contributes to several negative effects on the environment due to the emission of greenhouse gases ( Chua and Oh, 2010). Presently, conventional power systems mainly rely on the usage of nonrenewable resources such as oil, gas, and coal.
In the past few years, increasing sustainable growth in the industrial sector and global population have increased energy demand. Moreover, the results of the proposed study imply that the proposed renewable energy system in remote sites could be a more economical measure. According to the results, the Kanyakumari location outperforms in terms of producing environmental pollutants with emission of 1,020 kg/y CO 2 at their best. In the stand-alone diesel operating mode, 41854 kg of CO 2 is produced, which is higher than CO 2 emissions associated with any other renewable energy systems. This is economical compared to a stand-alone diesel system where the obtained COE is $1.88 and the NPC is $977523. The study finds that the least cost of electricity and the net present cost of electricity for Thoothukudi are achieved at 0.266 $/kWh and 138,197 $, respectively. Also, the impact of intermittent variables becomes significant, so sensitivity analysis for the various parameters has been carried out. Comparing with conventional diesel generators among all the locations, a combination of solar/wind/diesel/battery is the economically best design for Thoothukudi, with the least and most reliable solution in terms of net present cost and cost of energy. The findings indicated that the off-grid solar–wind–diesel–battery configuration is the most economical for all the sites among other system configurations. Various combinations of the systems have been compared and analyzed based on the performance of their technical parameters, costs, the electrical power production of each source, and unmet load. The techno-economic study of stand-alone hybrid photovoltaic–wind turbine–diesel–battery-converter energy systems based on the hybrid optimization model for electric renewable (HOMER) simulation has been analyzed for various locations in the Tamil Nadu state, India. Therefore, the aim of this research is to identify the best combination of hybrid renewable energy systems (HRESs) to satisfy the load demand in a sustainable and cost-efficient way. School of Electrical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, IndiaĮlectrification in rural areas is relatively costly compared to urban areas.