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Design and Preliminary Performance Results of the First Hybrid Diesel / Photovoltaic System Without Storage for Isolated Mini- Grids in the Brazilian Amazon Region

This paper reports on the design, installation and first results of a hybrid diesel / photovoltaic system that has recently been installed in the Brazilian Amazon region. In the northern Brazilian rainforest there are hundreds of small towns that are not connected to the national power grid. These settlements, where annual sunshine levels are above 2000 kWh/m 2 , are usually supplied with electricity by small to medium (< 1 MVA) diesel generators, to which a mini-grid is connected. O&M costs for these thermal gen set units is high and increasing, since most of these communities are in the outback and fuel costs are escalating. In this context this work presents the system design and proposal of adding PV without storage to displace diesel consumption, and presents first-hand results from a first unit that has recently been installed by LABSOLAR. A ~ 20 kWp triplejunction amorphous silicon PV system has been added to a 60 kVA diesel gen set which was already operational, feeding an isolated community through a mini-grid in the settlement of Araras (10 o S, 65 o W), near the Brazil-Bolivia border. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, and fine-tunning of operational parameters is under way to optimise the hybrid-system performance both from the PV and diesel gen set sides. The success of this government-sponsored project should lead to a full-scale government initiative to extend the addition of PV to most or all of the villages in the region, which would trigger the need of PV module mass production in Brazil.