Microgrids planning for rural electrification

A large part of the population living in rural areas of developing countries does not have access to electricity because the investment is high due to the low population density and some households cannot afford the high electricity bill. Therefore, some of them invest in small photovoltaic generation units called Solar Home System (SHS). The objective of this paper is to provide a microgrid planning methodology including grid design, optimal location and sizing of SHSs and battery energy storage in a context of rapid and low-cost electrification while waiting for a potential connection to the MV distribution grid. To solve these optimization problems, the minimum spanning tree algorithm and a genetic algorithm are selected and tested on a rural village in Cambodia.