Techno – Economic - Environmental Assessment of Hydro based Microgrid Architectures for Prosumers

The study of new solutions and the role and benefits of PV prosumers is a world-wide approach, while the topics regarding prosumers supplied from other distributed energy resources, such as hydro resources are rarely examined. The present paper aims to investigate the technical, economic and environmental consequences of using micro-hydro resource to produce electrical energy for a prosumer versus other RES production methods, such as solar or wind-based technologies. The methodology to be applied for the techno-economic-environmental assessment is the use of HOMER software. Different microgrid architectures based on monitoring data from the Arges riverbed are studied within 24 case studies. The exploitation of hydraulic energy is done by a 5.89 kW water turbine; the solar energy is used for the generation of electricity through PV panels having 4.4-24 kW power installed and the wind energy can be exploited by a 3 kW or a 10kW wind turbine. For the simulation of economic conditions, the legislation to promote renewables by using the compensation scheme as financial support was applied. The results indicate that the hydro based configurations lead to low net present cost rates and levelized cost of energy. The climate data correspond to the village Căpățâneni, Argeș county, Romania. The main conclusion of this work is that micro-hydro can generate similar or even better benefits compared to solar or wind electrical energy production from local low potential RES.