Environmental implications of renewable distributed generation technologies in rural electrification

Customer choices and competition have led the electric utilities to undergo major regulatory and technological changes while power sector reform continues. A part of this change also originates from the rapid emergence of viable small-scale distributed generation (DG) sources that are highly competitive with grid-delivered electricity in the isolated areas. In this article, the cost-effectiveness of renewable DG sources (i.e., photovoltaics, small-scale wind turbines, and biomass gasifiers) are assessed and compared with centralized generation for the case of a rural and isolated island in the western state of India using the Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables (HOMER), developed and provided by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The model identifies a least cost set of various DG and centralized grid capacities and ranks them based on a life cycle cost. The adoption of DG technologies (especially wind and biomass gasifiers) provide no-regret options with significant CO2 emission mitigation potential when operated under net-metering scheme.