Guinea Bissau has a global population of 1.7 million inhabitants, of which 500,000 are concentrated in its capital Bissau. 39.5% of the population is in an age group from 0-14 years, 20% between 15-24 years, with a life expectancy at birth of 49.5 years. In the ranking of the so-called Human Development Index (HDI), it is at 164th out of 169 countries, with a child mortality rate of 12% (in rural areas up to 18%) corresponding to the fourth-last place in the world ranking (in CH = 4 / 1000). The HIV seropositivity rate of the adult population is 10-15%, 7.9% in pregnant women.
Guinea Bissau does not currently have a functional health network and most facilities work without central coordination.
The Renato Grandi center has been operating since 1/04/2014 in the premises of the Centro Materno Infantile Ceu and Terras (project aimed primarily at taking care of HIV-positive women and their children), the Renato Grandi Center immediately became a reference point for all pediatric diseases of the city of Bissau (and not). In 2015, 13,222 outpatient visits were carried out.
Analyzing the context and the activity of the current Renato Grandi Center during the first 3 years and proportioning them to the pediatric population in the Bissau area, it emerges the need to increase the volume of services by at least double.
Such a significant expansion obviously also requires greater energy support.
Despite being close to a large city, a hospital needs some stability in the supply of energy, therefore an emergency generator has been installed as usual in many modern hospitals.
The national electricity grid in this country is however highly unstable and the price of energy is very high, so the designer and installer of the hospital's electrical systems, Margor srl, deemed it necessary to rely on us FGS Alternative Energy for the supply of an Off-Grid photovoltaic system.
For this installation we have chosen to combine two different system choices in order to derive different advantages from both: Approximately 50kW of photovoltaic production are in fact connected via a SMA Tripower photovoltaic inverter to a Multicluster switchboard and to 9 SMA Sunny Island inverters, this "side" of the The system allows AC loads to be fed more efficiently as they are powered directly not by passing the battery charging / discharging process.
Another 40 kW of photovoltaic production are connected to Studer VS120 charge regulators in order to feed energy directly into the batteries and then use it only in the event of failure to produce the photovoltaic system or particular peaks in the user's energy request.
Here are some photos of the plant being processed in our laboratory:
Here are some photos of the tests we performed on SMA inverters in our laboratory:
Following a general synoptic scheme of the system:
