Techno-economic evaluation of a hybrid PV/diesel water pumping system for different pumping heads

Decentralized electricity production from renewable energy sources provide a great benefit of security of supply for consumers while respecting the environment. The load fluctuations according to daily or annual periods and of pumping head are not necessarily proportional to resources. For remote areas, the solution to adopt is maybe the coupling between several various sources of energy. In this paper, we propose a study of the possibility of using photovoltaic /diesel hybrid systems with battery storage for different heads of a water pumping system, which can satisfy the water requirements for irrigation of a typical remote and arid area. A techno-economic study was carried out using the Hybrid Optimization Model (HOMER) in order provide the best system configuration suitable for the location based on an hour-by-hour data for energy availability and demands.