Shaeb al Buttum – Comet-ME

Location : Shaeb al Buttum, Palestine
Date of Installation: October 2011

  • Installation of two 4.2 turbines in a hybrid system with PV to provide electricty to 15 families in the West Bank.
  • Comet-ME raises the installation costs and the families pay electricity bills to cover the cost of maintenance and repair.

Energy Demand

This is a mini-grid system providing power to 15 families. Each family consumes about 3KWH a day and is using it for: light, washing machine, butter churns, refrigerators, charging mobile phones and computers and few hours of TV

Equipment installed

  • Two 4.2 m home brewed Hugh Piggott design
  • Inverter: WindyBoy by SMA
  • 20 Magnets: 15 coils each 250 turns of 0.9 mm diameter
  • Hybrid system: the turbines provide about 20% of the energy and are coupled to 8 kWp of PV.On Cloudy days there is more wind and the wind power is the dominant generator. On most sunny days, the wind starts at noon and slows down at night so the wind and solar energy complement each other.

Financing

  • The installation infrastructure is fully paid by donors.
  • User pay electricity bills by a prepaid meter and following the same tariff as in the cities in Palestinian cities.
  • Money is saved for batteries and other components replacement: This way, bill collection will pay at least 70% of battery costs. The rest will be raised from donations.
  • We are looking for better ways to handle it, so we shall be less dependent on donors.

Ownership & Management

  • The community owns the installation
  • System is operated and maintained by the community and Comet-Me
  • The training of the community is a continued work: It starts during the installation and continues all the time. We assign one or two supervisors and train them for weekly tasks and diagnostics.
  • After the installation is completed the system is handed over to the community. At this point we sign a service contract with them.

Problems & Solution

  • We had a failure of the turbine shaft bearing. We had to replace the bearing house.
  • We had to fine tune the inverter parameters

Highlights

It is our first AC bus off grid system with solar and wind power.

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