Victron Energy’s blog has featured our Simigoan microgrid, in a guest post by our Managing Director, Joel Basham, published on the official Victron Energy blog on 8 February 2017.
Simigoan is a small village of Sherpa and Tamang people at around 2,000 metres in the Nepal Himalaya, on the trekking route to the Gaurishankar base camp. The village first electrified in 2007 with a micro-hydro system serving around 120 households, the local clinic, and the school over roughly 1.5 kilometres of aerial cable. The 2015 earthquake hit hard — most buildings collapsed, the clinic and a brand-new school were destroyed, and the trekking trade that many families relied on stopped overnight. The micro-hydro kept running, but only enough to supply power at night.
To supplement the village’s rebuilding effort, Peak Power designed and installed a three-phase solar and battery system built around Victron Multiplus inverter/chargers, MPPT solar charge controllers, and a Trina Solar PV array, monitored through a BMV battery monitor and Color Control GX. The system was sized to feed power in during the day and support the micro-hydro network at night, giving the village a more resilient, mixed energy supply rather than relying on a single source.
As the Victron post describes, getting equipment to site was the hardest part of the job — everything had to be carried on foot from the nearest road, three hours straight uphill, including full battery banks and inverter stacks. A new building was constructed to house the system, and the distribution network needed new poles and conductors to correct voltage drop issues left over from the original hydro installation. The system was installed in early January 2017, with commissioning completed later that month, giving Simigoan power day and night for the first time since the earthquake — and the resilience of two independent generation sources going into the next trekking season.
You can read the full Victron Energy blog post here, or see the technical write-up and photos on our Simigoan Microgrid project page.