Optimization of Hybrid Renewable Energy in

Sarawak Remote Rural Area Using HOMER

Software
Yanuar Z. Arief Nur Anisah Aziera Abdul Halim Mohd Hafiez Izzwan Saad
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Eng. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Eng. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Eng.
Faculty of Engineering Faculty of Engineering Faculty of Engineering
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
(UNIMAS) (UNIMAS) (UNIMAS)
Kota Samarahan,, Sarawak, Malaysia Kota Samarahan,, Sarawak, Malaysia Kota Samarahan,, Sarawak, Malaysia
ayzulardiansyah@unimas.my anisahaziera1996@gmail.com smhizzwan@unimas.my

Abstract—In past few years, there has been a huge concern rural areas. The statistic in 2013 has stated that the
about decentralized electricity supply in Sarawak, Malaysia. Malaysia’s electricity access rate had reached to 96.86%.
Renewable energy resources can be seen as an alternative energy The percentage contribution of electricity in Peninsular
to capture the remote rural electrification’s problems. Installing Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak are 99.72%, 92.92% and
and operating a renewable energy generation is not difficult but 88.01%, respectively [2]. In 2016, SEB has identified 4,316
it requires cautious step as to make sure maximum use of energy villages that consist of 40,000 homes in rural area have not
can improve the electrification. Therefore, the aim of this paper received 24-hour electricity yet [3]. The lack of electricity
is to critically analyze five types of optimized hybrid renewable intensifies the poverty where the developing countries have
energy systems in term of financial and power production using
high demand for electricity. However, the government state
HOMER software. This paper approaches four renewable energy
resources, namely solar, hydro, wind and biomass in three
and villagers are expected to have positive social economic
remote rural areas located in Limbang, Kapit and Sri Aman impacts in the future.
regions. Different combination of solar PV system, micro-hydro The renewable energy resources is an alternative energy
generator, wind turbine and biomass generator together with to capture the remote rural electrification’s problems since
battery storage and converter were studied. The optimization the off-grid hybrid renewable energy focusing in rural area is
between these different sizes of system was built based on energy to reduce the poverty rate. The combination of two or more
demand satisfaction, system cost and carbon gas emission. hybrid renewable energy eventually give advantages in
Comparison between operational of behaviors hybrid renewable
supporting the shortcoming of electrical energy and give
energy systems with stand-alone diesel generator only were also
carried out to elucidate the effects on investment cost and
strength to unpredictable renewable energy resources [4].
environment. The results revealed that hybrid hydro with battery However, a major problem with this kind of application is to
system is seen to be the cheapest system and has the best find the optimum hybrid energy that can satisfy customers’
technical performance in all locations. Solar PV and biomass demand with minimum cost. This problem can be overcome
generator system were combined with hydro generator as a back- by doing a deep research on the potential of renewable
up power. It is also found that hybrid renewable energy is more energy system.
cost-effective and reduce of carbon emission compared to stand-
The main objective of this work is to simulate hybrid
alone diesel generator.
renewable energy sources which consist of PV system,
Keywords—HOMER, hybrid renewable energy resources, micro-hydro, wind turbine, and biomass generator at
remote rural area, net present cost, initial cost, operating cost. Sarawak rural remote area. This work also compares the cost
for hybrid renewable energy sources with stand-alone diesel
generator of electricity source only.
I. INTRODUCTION II. METHOD
Electricity energy has been one of backbones of A. HOMER software
supporting socio-economic development to a modernize
country as growing financial in industries and development HOMER that stands for Hybrid Optimization of Multiple
in the standards of living is the reason of rising in energy Electric Renewables is a software developed by the National
consumption. Fossil fuels energy such as coal and natural gas Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), US to design and
of conventional energy contribute to greenhouse impact and evaluate technically and financially the options for off-grid
start to appreciate natural resources in order to help and on-grid power systems for remote, stand-alone and
electrification in some inaccessible rural areas. Based on the distributed generation applications. HOMER calculates the
current rising trend of fuel prices in the world market, mathematical data and generates results of feasible
Malaysia government perceived the potential of renewable configurations sorted by Net Present Cost (NPC) to
energy as an alternative option to make sure the compares various design configurations on the basis of
sustainability of energy resources [1]. operational and economic rates. The possible system
configurations can evaluate from HOMER’s optimization
Sarawak has a low electrification access in Malaysia and sensitivity analysis.
which most of them are living in unreachable electric grid of

978-1-7281-3494-9/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

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 Fig. 1. HOMER simulation concept [5-6].

Fig. 1 shows the HOMER simulation concept in hybrid harnessed from various types of biomass residue. In this
renewable energy sources simulation. Three cores of work, empty fruit bunch (EFB) which is the leftover of the
capability of HOMER software which consists of simulation, fresh fruit bunch (FFB) of palm oil is chosen as the biomass
optimization and sensitive analysis. The simulation simulates fuel in Malaysia. This is due to the fact that Malaysia is one
all potential combinations of components depending on the of the biggest palm oil producers with abundance supply of
different scenarios. HOMER filter and optimize the best palm oil residue to be harnessed. The EFB residue quantity
configuration and then it displays a list of configurations can be calculated which is found to be 23% from the FFB
sorted according to lifecycle cost. [11]. Throughout the calculation, it is assumed that only 80%
of the available EFB in the location is used for the site. In
As a case study, three remote rural areas in Sarawak summary, the data of solar irradiation including PV data,
have been selected, namely Limbang (A), Kapit (B), and Sri water flow rate, and EFB capacity of each location can be
Aman (C) as shown in Fig. 2. All of three locations have seen in Table II.
solar, hydro, wind, and biomass energy resources, however
the effectiveness of each energy is depending on the Fig. 4 shows the schematic diagram of the system
geographical area. simulated in HOMER, whereby the components are
connected to either AC or DC bus. With AC output being
produced, biomass generator is connected to the AC bus and
B. Load Profile can directly supply AC load. Meanwhile, both PV module
The daily load profile is based on typical daily load at and wind turbine which are generating DC power are
Malaysian village household [7-8]. Fig. 3 shows the detail connected to the DC bus. The battery storage stores the DC
load profile in one day for typical household in village and power whenever there is excessive electricity produced,
typical electricity consumption is depicted in Table 1 [9]. while the converter functions by converting DC power from
The scenario of load consumption in one rural area is the PV and wind turbine to the AC power to serve load.
assumed to have 100 houses with average load specification. Table III shows the output capacity rate in kWh for each
Therefore, load profile in HOMER is increased by a factor component of renewable energy sources which are used in
of 100. In addition, the average of load and peak load are this simulation. For each component, cost of capital,
844 kWh/day and 103 kW, respectively. A day-to-day and replacement and operating and maintenance (O&M) are
time-step-to-step in HOMER is set as 2% as to consider the taken into consideration.
effect of randomness. The random variables are percentage
to obtain a more realistic load data.

C. Renewable energy resource data

For hybrid renewable energy simulation of PV, micro-
hydro, wind, and biomass, some important data are required,
namely average solar irradiation, water flow rate, wind
speed, and capacity of empty fruit bunch (EFB) for biomass
resource at each location.
The solar irradiation and wind speed data can be directly
accessed from NASA surface meteorology and solar energy
website by inserting the location’s coordinates of each
location in HOMER software. The data obtained consists of
daily solar irradiation, clearness index and air temperature. Fig. 2. Case study location for hybrid renewable energy simulation: (A)
The water flow rate data for each location were obtained Limbang, (B) Kapit, and (C) Sri Aman.
from SEB R&D data [10]. Biomass energy resource can be

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 Fig. 3. Load profile for typical a household in village [7-8].
Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of hybrid model in Homer.

TABLE III. THE CAPACITY RATE FOR EACH COMPONENT OF HYBRID

TABLE I. TYPICAL ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION OF HOUSEHOLD VILLAGE RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES
IN MALAYSIA [9]
Component Capacity (kWh)
Appliances Wattages Hours Daily load Annual
(W) of use demand load Peimar SG 360M solar panel 1
(h) (kWh/day) demand
(kWh/year) Generic Hydro 100 kW 100
9 lamp 9 x 40 6 2.16 788.4
1 TV 80 6 0.48 175.2 Bergey Excel 10 wind turbine 10
1 refrigerator 100 24 2.40 876.0
4 fan 4 x 100 5 2.00 730.0 HAITAI Biomass generator 100
1 washing 250 2 0.50 182.5
machine Princeton DRI-100 inverter 100
Total 7.54 2752.1
Surrette 6CS25P battery 6.91

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

TABLE II. RENEWABLE ENERGY RESOURCE DATA FOR EACH LOCATION
The model components, namely diesel generator, PV
(A) Limbang (B) Kapit (C) Sri Aman solar system, hydro turbine system, wind system, biomass
Location 4°12.1’N, 2°39.0’N 1°12.5’N, generator, converter and battery are simulated for three
115°34.4’E 113°44.4’E 110°55.6’E selected regions, which are Limbang, Kapit and Sri Aman.
Five feasible system types are discussed in term of
Average Solar
irradiation 5.05 4.84 4.62
economic and technical point of views, which are hydro
(kWh/m2/day) with battery and converter (Hbc), hydro and biomass with
PV area (m2)
battery and converter (HBbc), hydro and solar with battery
2024.58 2112.42 2213.01
and converter (HPbc), biomass with battery and converter
PV peak (Bbc), and hydro + wind with battery and converter
374.55 390.80 409.41 (HWbc).
power (kWp)
Fig. 5. Shows the production of electrical energy for
Number of PV 1249 1303 1364
modules (unit) each system. Note that for all five systems in three different
Water flow 5.2164 0.3466 0.4010
locations, the hydro energy is found as the highest power
rate (m3/s) production per year. In Limbang, the water flow rate at
Wind speed 2.690 2.260 3.120 Pa’beluyu river has potential to generate over 742 kW/day
(m/s)
and produce 5,605 MWh/year. For this reason, a bulk hydro
Empty fruit
bunch (EFB) 838.98 287.28 238.03 turbine can be built in Limbang river and supply to another
(t/ha/day) rural area. Contrary to Limbang, Wong Kepayang river in
Sri Aman has potential to generate 59 kW/day. Since the
peak load of a village is expected up to 100 kW/day, hydro
energy need a battery for storage as the system is not
capable to supply sufficient electricity at one time.
Meanwhile, the 50 kW biomass generator is expected to
generate 308,13kWh/year with 1,304 L/year regardless in
different EFB residue in three locations. This is because the
biomass generator is operating at the maximum power that
adequate to light up the whole remote rural area without

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have any excess electricity. In this case, biomass generator
has to be upgraded if the village grows up after 25 years.
The cost analysis is start with net present cost (NPC),
initial and operating cost of each hybrid renewable systems
as shown in Fig. 6. As can be seen from the figure, Hbc
system has the lowest investment with $468,651 over 25
years with $329,000 of initial cost. The operating cost of
Hbc also comes as the cheapest as hydro energy source is
free and the system only need to be upgraded after 25 years.
The installation stand-alone Bbc system is low with cost of
$468,283. However, Bbc has the highest operating cost
among five hybrid renewable systems because it need to buy
biomass fuel to burn up the generator. The HWbc comes as Fig. 5. Production of electrical energy based on the different type of
the most expensive investment with $841,731 for 25 years. systems.
While, in this case, the operating cost is low because solar
and wind energy sources are free. Thus, the most optimized
hybrid renewable systems are hydro with battery and
converter (Hbc).
This work also compared the five optimized systems
with stand-alone diesel generator. The economic and
technical potential of five hybrid renewable energy systems
were simulated in HOMER software is analyzed in terms of
the cost expensed as well as the electricity production. A
120 kW of genset is needed to supply local household
electrical demand. Hence, operation of the generator is
scheduled to operate 24 hours/day. The comparison of Hbc,
HBbc, Bbc, HPbc and HWbc systems to stand-alone diesel
generator are categorized according to NPC, initial/capital
and operating cost as illustrated in Fig. 7. It is found that
diesel generator has the highest investment among the six
Fig. 6. Total cost for the different type of systems.
systems. The first optimized hybrid is Hbc system which
invested about $468,651 for 25 years, meanwhile the NPC
of diesel generator is about hundred times, which is
$46,189,380. This shows that hybrid renewable energy
systems can be saved over 60% compared to invest the
stand-alone diesel generator in one remote rural area. With
regards to this matter, the cost of electricity if using diesel
generator is $11.60 for every kWh used.
Biomass generator and diesel generator are analyzed in
term of gas emission. The comparison of carbon emission
and other gasses is shown in Table IV. It is found that the
biomass generator produce carbon dioxide (CO2) gas about
1,846 kg/year, which is very low if compared to
350,587 kg/year of CO2 produced by diesel generator. It is
clearly showed that diesel generator has emitted many
greenhouse gases to atmosphere. These gases are released
during the combustion of diesel to generate electricity. This Fig. 7. Comparison of total cost with stand-alone diesel generator only.
is because diesel is made of hydrocarbon (HC) which
convert into water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Also, TABLE IV. COMPARISON OF GAS EMISSION
diesel generator emitted carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur
Gas Type Biomass (kg/year) Diesel (kg/year)
dioxide and nitrogen oxides gases which can contribute to
air pollution and global warming. In contrast, biomass Carbon dioxide 1,846 350,587
residue is made from carbohydrate (CHO). The reason that Carbon monoxide 2.07 2,210
biomass is a low carbon fuel is because biomass breathes
Unburned
carbon dioxide and stores it in its tissue. It is proved that hydrocarbons
0 96.4
using renewable energy sources can help to minimize the
greenhouse gases and the air become cleaner. Particulate matter 0 13.4
Sulfur dioxide 0 859
Nitrogen oxide 1.29 2,076

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT no. 2, pp. 1–7, 2014
The authors would like to thank Universiti Malaysia
Sarawak (UNIMAS) for the financial support under Small
Grant Scheme (F02/SGS/1784/2018) in facilitation and
support in completing this research work.

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