English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Off-grid systems play a prominent role in rural electrification planning. The problem of optimizing the generation design of a single off-grid system has received a significant amount of attention in the literature, and several software tools and algorithms have addressed it. However, methods and tools designed for individual mini-grids are not directly applicable to regional planning, where it is necessary to estimate the generation cost of potentially thousands of mini-grids. Conversely, most regional planning tools estimate the generation cost of mini-grids with rules of thumb or analytical expressions. These estimations are useful, but they lack the accuracy necessary to develop a rural electrification plan. This paper presents a method to estimate the generation cost of any potential off-grid system in a large-scale rural electrification planning problem, which is currently implemented in the Reference Electrification Model (REM). The method uses a master-slave decomposition that exploits the structure of the problem and combines continuous and discrete variables. The algorithm is illustrated with a case study that shows that a direct application of a discrete model may lead to suboptimal results in large-scale planning.

Optimizing Off-Grid Generation in Large-Scale Electrification-Planning Problems: A Direct-Search Approach