Cost Allocation strategy for off grid system in rural area: a case study on irrigation for rural agricultural lands in India

In rural areas of developing countries, irrigation systems may rely on water pumps powered by the national grid. Unfortunately, scheduled and unscheduled blackouts, or poor quality of the power supply often reduce the possibility of a secure electricity service for cultivation purposes. To increase the energy security, farmers could switch to the use of stand-alone power systems. Applying the concepts of cooperative game theory allows analysing different configurations for irrigation systems based on solar power (i.e. solar Photovoltaic (PV) pumps) and understanding if sharing such a system could be a socially acceptable and stable solution. In this work, we analyse the stability of the solution considering the effect of different electrical loads – due to the daily and monthly variability of irrigation patterns – on the choice of the final system configuration. We used the Shapley Value to allocate the costs of a solar generator that three Indian farmers could potentially share. We estimated different yearly load profiles for different irrigation patterns employing a stochastic bottom-up approach. The physical operation of the electric plants has been simulated by applying a MATLAB® code based on numerical methods, which consider accurate physical models for best describing each system component (i.e. PV array, battery bank, inverters, etc.) and an appropriate criterion (i.e. the objective function) to choose the best combination of components that addresses the load.