HOMER Knowledge Base

HOMER Knowledge Base

Village power system in HOMER

I need to know how to calculate the houses loads or multiply the one house load with the number of the houses and the utilization factor of the loads?

 

To model a village power system in HOMER, you need to specify the electrical load that the power system will need to serve.  That will be the total electrical load from all the houses in the village, plus any other load from, for example, street lighting.  HOMER needs to know the load in all 8760 hours of the year.

If you have hourly load data (which is very rare in my experience) you can import it into HOMER's Primary Load Inputs window.  Otherwise, you can specify the load as a 24-hour average load profile, and HOMER will piece together 365 of those days to make a full year.  HOMER's Help system contains more information on these subjects -- just click the Help button in the Primary Load Inputs window.

You'll need to assume a typical 24-hour load profile for one house, then multiply that by the number of houses to find the total load on the power system.  The total load will be "smoother" than the load for a single house because the houses will not all use electricity in the same way at the same time.  You can account for that by smoothing the total load profile, which means spreading out the peaks.