Village Power Project

HOMER Energy is featured among "key industry players" in the new Pike Research report examining the potential for the international remote microgrid market. Pike Research is predicting a 21% increase in capacity for the remote microgrid market by 2017, from 349 MW to 1.1 GW.

As developing countries improve their standard of living, energy use is increasing, and hybrid renewable energy systems are viewed as an important sustainable economic development opportunity. Village power systems represent the largest potential subset of the remote microgrid market, according to Pike.

The HOMER software has its roots in the Village Power Program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. HOMER Energy is anticipating increasingly strong sales potential in remote energy markets. Read more

Solar Energy International is honoring Walt - who was an alumni, instructor and friend - by offering training scholarships to students who embody his spirit of adventure, hard work and dedication to the people of the developing world. For more information and to contribute to the scholarship fund, visit SEI.

Have you ever wondered what the symbols  and  mean in the Optimization Results window? This indicates that an off-grid system has either:

1. a high renewable penetration with no storage and may require additional analysis to determine appropriate controls for the final design (), or
2. a high renewable penetration with storage, but the storage has a low system autonomy ().

Integrating high renewable penetration systems requires special considerations to assure system stability. The simplest, but not necessarily best, way to do this is by using a large amount of storage.

HOMER calculates the instantaneous renewable penetration by dividing the total renewable electrical power output (in kW) by the total electrical load served [kW] in each time step. It displays the maximum value under the Electrical tab. For systems with storage, HOMER calculates the battery autonomy by dividing the battery bank’s nominal capacity by the average load. It displays this under the Battery tab.

The values of the parameters that trigger the warnings can be set by the user. They are found under the menu File > Preferences. HOMER provides default values that are a rough guide for when more detailed modeling may be required. That situation requires a different kind of model that consider the system’s transient responses to rapid changes in the load balance. See High Penetrations of Renewable Energy for Island Grids for more information on this situation.

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