Development of a Household Synthetic Load Profile for Rural Electrification

Abstract

Understanding the electrical energy consumption load profile of the rural household is a necessary first step in the economical and reliable sizing of standalone renewable-based power supply systems for rural communities. The electric demand is highly stochastic and varies from time to time, day to day, and season to season. This paper mainly focuses on proposing a new method and constructing a household synthetic load profile based on a stochastic, bottom-up approach while taking into account the household appliances’ technical and operational characteristics without the need for measured historical data. The average energy consumption and stochastic load profile of a single household and a sample rural village in Ethiopia with ten households during weekdays, weekends, and holidays are presented and analyzed for rural electrification. The synthetic load profile is constructed with 1-min high resolution and implemented using MATLAB software. The daily energy demand of a middle-class single family is obtained as 2.029 kWh/day, 2.347 kWh/day, and 2.684 kWh/day on weekdays, weekends, and holidays, respectively. The daily energy usage is increased to 5.084 kWh/day, 5.396 kWh/day, and 6.728 kWh/day for weekdays, weekends, and holidays, respectively, when additional electric stove and blender loads are used.