Novel procedure to formulate load profiles for off-grid rural areas

•We review approaches available in the literature for load profile formulation of rural consumers.•We develop and describe a new stochastic bottom-up mathematical procedure.•We implement the new procedure in the software LoadProGen.•We validate the procedure with a case study based on a rural college in Cameroon.•The procedure can be employed to support the design process of off-grid rural electrification systems.

In this paper, we describe the development, implementation and application of a novel mathematical procedure devoted to formulating the daily load profiles of off-grid consumers in rural areas. The procedure aims at providing such profiles as input data for the design process of off-grid systems for rural electrification. Indeed, daily load profiles represent an essential input for off-grid systems capacity planning methods based on steady-state energy simulation and lifetime techno-economic analyses, and for the analysis of the logics to control the energy fluxes among the different system components. Nevertheless, no particular attention has been devoted so far in the scientific literature as regards specific approaches for daily load profiles estimates for rural consumers. In order to contribute to covering this gap, we developed a new mathematical procedure taking into consideration the specific features of rural areas. The procedure is based on a set of data that can be surveyed and/or assumed in rural areas, and it relies on a stochastic bottom-up approach with correlations between the different load profile parameters (i.e. load factor, coincidence factor and number of consumers) in order to build up the coincidence behavior of the electrical appliances. We have implemented the procedure in a software tool (LoadProGen) which can eventually support the off-grid systems design process for rural electrification. Finally, we have applied the procedure to a case study in order to clarify the proposed approach.