Description:
The level of electrification in Homboza village, one of the many rural areas in Tanzania, is very low. Homboza village is the case study in this paper has a population of 5,565. Out of thoseless than 10 percent accessofelectricityenergy. This study attributed these threemajor barrierstolow electrification rate. The first barrier is the high investment costs which yield too high average costs of providing electricity services to rural areas. The second barrier is high costs of extending the grid to rural areas. The third barrier is the small and dispersed nature of electricity demand, arising from a population of low density and low income levels. To overcome these and extend the power distribution this village, this paper proposes Single Wire Earth Return (SWER) electrification scheme. This is because SWER’s installation costs are about one third of equivalent three-phase three-wire system and one half of the single-phase systems. This paper presents a Carson line model of SWER for Homboza village and is simulated in MATLAB 2013b, and as a comparison, a single phase two-wire system is simulated too. The simulation results show that the earth potential between the ground electrodes is 18.15 Vfor the SWER. Further, theSWER shows 10.07% voltage drop and 10.34% power loss over 20 kilometers of distribution line. While single phase two-wire system shows18.89% voltage drop and 19.58% power loss over the 20 kilometers of distribution line. There is a possibility of supplying Homboza using SWER technology.