/  May 01, 2005  -  December 31, 2020

Hybridsystems Gambia

Partners Instituto Tecnologico, Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias, SC IPA SA CIFATT Craiova, University of Kassel
Funding  REMIS, green power providers
Duration 01.05.2005 - 31.12.2020
Scientists Markus Landau (project coordinator), Randolf Geipel, Michel Vandenbergh

 

A reliable power supply is an indispensable basis for the diverse tasks in a hospital. For example, electricity is needed to power medical equipment, to cool medicines and rooms for communicational facilities, and to light rooms and workplaces. In industrialized countries, a strong electrical grid is available for this purpose, but not in the small West African town of Darsilami. Here, the Hilfs-Center-Essen-Darsilami (HCE) e.V. is supporting the construction of a hospital. REMIS GmbH (Cologne) had set itself the goal of supplying electricity to the hospital.

On the initiative of REMIS and with the support of many other partners, a solar energy container with a hybrid PV-battery-diesel system was built and tested in Kassel in 2004 under the technical direction of Fraunhofer IEE (formerly ISET). The technical key data of the supply system are 3-kWp photovoltaic system, two PV string inverters, two grid-forming battery converters with 4.5 kVA each, a battery array (60 V, 300 Ah C10) consisting of 30 gel-lead cells, single-phase 9.6-kW diesel generator, charging and temperature management for the battery array, energy management through priority load disconnections, high supply security through redundant design of the components, operating data acquisition with remote data transmission.
With the help of some hospital employees, the power supply was set up and commissioned in Darsilami at the end of November 2004. Technicians were trained on site to perform simple system tasks, such as cleaning the solar generator or reading the energy meters.

In order to make the dissemination of such hybrid systems sustainable, a small training project was started with the Gambian technical school GTTI. Initially, two prospective engineers spent six weeks in the Gambia, on the one hand to get to know the technical skills and potential on site, and on the other hand to introduce interested students of the GTTI to the subject of photovoltaics. This visit is to be followed by several weeks of training for two selected GTTI students in Kassel at the beginning of 2006.