Operational Performance of a Solar Battery Backup System in a Small Manufacturing Facility in Ariaria Market Abia State

The research was designed, installed and tested a Solar PV and battery storage system to guarantee a resilient electricity supply to a small-scale industrial facility located in the Ariaria market of Nigeria, which suffers from fluctuating-loads and intermittency of electricity supply that may disrupt the production process. The instantaneous load and daily electrical consumption were statistically documented regarding temporal and energy demand characteristics. PV grid integration, battery state of charge (SOC) profile, back-up energy capacity and system operational efficiency for adequate drive energy supply during power outages, for critical load and manufacturing were evaluated. The instantaneous load aggregation, time-integrated energy consumption, irradiance-dependent PV drive, temperature-dependent PV drive, battery state of charge (SOC), and energy efficiency mathematical models were created. Ten samples of load demanding periods, with varying facility demand, irradiance, battery discharge and failure of the grid for different durations were analysed. It was seen that the variation of the facility load demand profile with different load demands was in the range of 8.2 to 16.0 kW per day, daily energy consumption 58.4 to 111.5 kWh, PV energy generation 4.1 to 7.3 kW under a variation of irradiance 485 to 820 W/m, battery SOC 91.5 to 57.8% and discharge power 3.8 to 7.4 kW respectively. Backup energy supply rose from 7.4 to 30.2 kWh during the failure of the grid ranging from 1.0 to 3.4 hours and highest operational system efficiency was observed during 2.3-h grid failure period, 86.5-91.4%. The study concluded that the intermittency of the load demand and energy supply can be reduced by the use of concurrently distributed renewable energy generation resources, battery-backed productive load facilities, better energy efficient construction, and operation of equipment, and by having resilient electricity infrastructure system for small and medium scale manufacturing energy users.