Hydro aeropower for sustainable electricity cost reduction in South African farming applications

This paper develops a model which can be used to minimize the electricity cost of South African farms through the usage of a wind pump with pico hydro generator and a borehole in pumped hydro storage configuration referred to as "hydro aeropower". This model will optimally schedule the generation power flow from the pico turbine given the demand, the state of water level in the reservoir as well as the electricity pricing period. This model can be implemented to control the power flow in small farming activities where boreholes and windmill are available. Therefore, a 2kW hydro aeropower using groundwater in a farming environment and operating under the Time of Use in South Africa is used to evaluate the possible cost reduction linked to the electricity usage achievable compared to the grid. Therefore, the problem can be seen as a minimization of the cost of energy purchased from the main electricity supplier, and the maximization of the energy used by the load directly supplied by the hydro aeropower in a dynamic pricing environment. Afterwards, the techno-economic performance of the proposed system is analysed using Matlab software. The results have revealed that up to 63.62% can be saved on the cost of energy consumed using the developed setup rather than supplying the load demand by the grid exclusively.