Examenspresentation av Rasmus Busse & Felix Davidsson

Conducted at Niassa Macadamia Limitada supervised by Fredrik Sandin

Opponent: Alice Fakt & Minea Nilsson

Abstract
Mozambique one of the least developed countries in the world where only a few percent of rural citizens have access to electricity and it is difficult for businesses to be competitive. This master thesis is done in collaboration with a company in Mozambique which harvests macadamia nuts and wants to process them to increase their value. The company has its plantation in the rural areas of northern Mozambique, Niassa province, and plans to build a process industry and have sustainable, on-site, energy generation to supply demand.
The aim of this report is to investigate what would be a suitable energy mix for the company that meets their demand and is based on renewable and sustainable generation technology. This will be done by creating an investment model in GAMS that utilizes linear programming to determine the energy mix and size of each technology. Different cases will be created and evaluated based on different factors such as annual cost, practicality and energy usage. Finally, the value of having a grid connection is discussed and the effects of grid outages and differences in solar variance are analyzed.

Big economic gains were noticed for grid connected systems and the solutions had cheaper annual costs but were highly dependent on the possibility to sell electricity. If the possibility to sell electricity was removed, installed generation capacity decreased and instead electricity was purchased from the grid. Grid connected solutions had no investments in energy storage but to handle outages, it was necessary to have batteries, where duration and time of outages were deemed most crucial. Variations in solar radiation had a significant effect on off-grid systems while grid connected solutions were barely affected.
Based on the observed cases and their results, the energy system with the lowest total annual cost is a grid connected system with solar PV for electricity generation and pyrolysis for heat generation. Unless the grid becomes more reliable or DMS can be utilized, a battery should be added to ensure processing during outages. For an off-grid solution, the same technologies would be used but the size of the battery should be increased.

Welcome!

Rasmus, Felix and Jimmy