P2P systems for Canada off-grid communities. A comparison with EU demo projects

The electric system of Canada’s remote off-grid communities faces several challenges, including high generation costs, limited access to fuel, cold climate, aging diesel generators, high variance of electric demand, environmental risk, limited generation capacity. A variety of solutions exist: each community should leverage on its strengths to develop the most appropriate. In this work a hybrid stand-alone system including hydrogen as energy storage is studied. Such system is applied to two Canadian case studies to see the effect on the levelized cost of energy. The current thesis is divided into five sections. Section one outlines the framework where this work collocates, describes the goal of it and presents a literature review of similar systems. Moreover, a description of remote communities across the Country is provided. Section two and three detail the two case studies developed, Paradise River and Colville Lake communities. A techno-economic analysis is carried out step by step, from load modeling to simulation of the system. Following the technical study, an economic study is developed and LCOE is calculated for different alternative scenarios. Sensitivity analysis on some parameters and comparisons among alternative options are presented as well. Environmental footprint is discussed in section 4, which provides an overview of the benefit such sustainable energy alternative can offer in terms of reduction of pollutant emissions. Section five resumes the results of the analysis comparing them with other Canadian and European studies. Specifically, a comparison with REMOTE EU project is carried out. In this part an investigation on regulatory and social aspects is also provided. The work, developed in collaboration with Ontario Tech university (former UOIT), aims to bring out the highlights of a sustainable hydrogen-based system which is overall non competitive with traditional solutions but can reveals attractive in special contexts such as remote communities.