Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology

Rural electrification remains one of the most persistent gaps in Sahelian energy access, and this study responds to it with a fully transparent, resource-adapted engineering methodology for sizing a photovoltaic-wind hybrid system rather than another generic feasibility exercise. What sets this work apart within the broader body of Sahelian hybrid-system literature is its combination of decade-long, site-specific satellite climatic data with a sizing method deliberately kept hand-calculable and free of proprietary optimisation software, so that it can be reproduced directly by field engineers and small technical offices, an approach that most comparable village-scale studies bypass in favour of commercial optimisation suites. The village of Tafaghatt, an off-grid settlement about 18 km north of the Aguié department in Niger's Maradi region (13.65° N, 7.71667° E), anchors the case study. Its daily electricity demand, estimated at 160 kWh/day from a disaggregated, appliance-level load inventory and a diversity factor benchmarked against comparable Sahelian villages, is split between the two renewable sources according to what the local resource can actually support: 75% (120 kWh/day) to the photovoltaic subsystem and 25% (40 kWh/day) to wind, a resource-driven allocation whose plausibility is cross-checked here against an independently HOMER Pro-optimised comparable Sahelian case that reached the same ratio. Solar and wind resources were characterised from ten years (2012-2021) of NASA, PVGIS and Meteorum climatic data, cross-validated against one another and processed through a dedicated MATLAB extrapolation script, yielding a mean daily solar irradiation of 5.60 kWh/m²/day and a mean wind speed of 4.49 m/s at the village site. Using the least-favourable-month sizing method, the photovoltaic field comprises 57 monocrystalline modules of 500 Wc (28.5 kWc), backed by a lithium iron phosphate battery bank of 240 kWh nominal capacity sized for 10 hours of autonomy, while the wind subsystem points to a 10 kW, 6.5 m-diameter turbine mounted at 35 m hub height. The complete hybrid system has a total installed capacity of 38.5 kW and should deliver about 64.1 MWh per year. This paper deliberately confines itself to technical design and sizing; the techno-economic feasibility (investment cost, levelised cost of energy, payback) and the environmental impact assessment of this same 38.5 kW configuration are the subject of a forthcoming companion paper. Beyond Tafaghatt, this work offers a fully replicable, resource-adapted sizing methodology for small PV-wind hybrid mini-grids across the Sahel.