Title: Reliability Assessment Of Hybrid Renewable Mini-Grids Under Demand And Weather Uncertainty
Authors: Bodise Lebrun Bolou-sobai, Sunday Ugemuge and Priye Kenneth Ainah
Volume: 10
Issue: 8
Pages: 44-49
Publication Date: 2026/08/28
Abstract:
Hybrid renewable mini-grids are increasingly proposed for communities where main-grid extension is delayed, costly, or unreliable. Yet a mini-grid that looks economical in an average-year simulation may fail badly during evening demand peaks, low-irradiance spells, wind lulls, battery derating, or generator outages. This paper presents a chronological reliability-assessment framework for solar--wind--battery--diesel mini-grids under coupled demand and weather uncertainty. The framework combines scenario generation, sequential dispatch, component availability sampling, and standard adequacy indices including loss of load probability, expected energy not served, system average interruption duration index, and value-weighted unserved energy. A representative rural mini-grid is used to demonstrate the method. The results show that storage, resource diversity, and weather-aware reserve policy reduce both the average unserved energy and the tail risk of scarcity events. The central conclusion is blunt: reliability must be treated as a stochastic design constraint, not as an afterthought appended to least-cost sizing.