Emergency Power Supply for NICU of a Hospital by Solar-Wind-Based System, a Step Towards Sustainable Development

Abstract

Equipping hospitals with emergency power supply is crucial. This is especially critical for important wards of the hospital, such as the NICU. Due to the importance of this issue, the present study, for the first time, studies the power supply of vital devices of the neonatal ward in one of the hospitals in Iran. Techno-econo-enviro studies have been performed using HOMER software on 20-year average data. The case study of this article is the Social Security Hospital in Farrokhshahr, Iran, where the system under study uses tree-shaped wind turbines, solar cells, diesel generators and batteries. The use of real data for the electrical consumption of the devices, use of wind and sun data in the form of 20-year averages, and use of up-to-date costs of equipment and consumed fuel, as well as the use of a new generation of the wind turbine, are the advantages of the present study. The results showed that the use of solar energy is superior to the use of wind energy, both economically and environmentally. The cheapest simulated system among 17640 possible scenarios, with the price of each kWh equal to 0.636$, was able to use 18% of the solar energy. In contrast, the cheapest wind turbine-based system was able to use 10% of the wind energy, with the price of every kWh wind electricity equal to 0.917$. The diesel generators are used in all optimal scenarios, which indicates that either the price of solar cells and wind electricity are high compared to the diesel generator, or the intensity of sunlight or wind speed are not high enough. Moreover, compared to the conventional system only consisting of diesel generator, the optimal scenarios of using solar cells and wind turbine, benefit from a reduction in produced pollutants equal to 4.8 and 4 tones/yr, respectively.