A Model of a Hybrid Power Plant With Wind Turbines and Compressed Air Energy Storage

Abstract

After a general overview of Hybrid Power Plants (HPP) and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), the authors present a thermo-economic model for the simulation and optimization of a HPP consisting of a wind turbine coupled with CAES. In the proposed scheme, during periods of excess power production, atmospheric air is compressed in a multistage compressor and cooled; when there is power demand, the compressed air is heated in multiple expansion stages using the stored heat and conventional thermal sources. Such plants can offer significant benefits in terms of flexibility in matching a fluctuating power demand, particularly when renewable sources, characterized by high and often unpredictable variability, are utilized. The possible advantages in terms of energy and cost savings with respect to other solutions must be carefully assessed, critically depending on performance and efficiencies of each sub-system, most of them operating in transient and off-design conditions. To this purpose, a thermodynamic model composed of several sub-systems describing wind turbine, multi-stage compressor, intercooler, aftercooler, heat recovery system, compressed air storage and turbine has been developed in Matlab/Simulink® environment. In the paper, several scenarios are compared by simulation and optimization analysis and a parametric study of the plant performance with respect to the main design variables is presented

Integration of Wind Turbines With Compressed Air Energy Storage

“…A 30 input (n i ) NAR was selected for this study: one layer with 20 hidden nodes (n h ), and a fifty epochs training phase with early stopping to reduce the overtraining problem. A complete description of this algorithm is outside the scope of this paper; please refer to [18] [19] for further details. Results show that the proposed forecasting model is suitable for implementation in an energy management strategy based on wind speed forecasting.…”

“…The economic feasibility of the investment is evaluated by means of Simple Pay-Back (SPB), Net Present Value (NPV) and Profitability Index (PI), defined as the ratio between present value of annual savings and investment costs. Modeling assumptions for the economic analysis are given in [13] [14].…”

“…Furthermore, the presence of two or more energy sources, the intrinsic variability and uncertainty related to renewable energy availability, the need to adopt suitable strategies to manage the energy storage system in presence of an unknown future energy demand depict a very complex scenario and make the analysis of these plants a very difficult task. To face this problem, complex model based methodologies are needed in order to determine the best plant structure and its optimal operation and scheduling, as a function of plant location and power demand [13], [14]. CAES operation can be at any desired power level from 10 MW to 110 MW.…”

Thermodynamic Analysis of Three Compressed Air Energy Storage Systems: Conventional, Adiabatic, and Hydrogen-Fueled

“…Existing literature has studied the thermodynamics of conventional CAES [10][11][12][13][14][15], A-CAES [16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and combustion of hydrogen instead of natural gas to fuel conventional CAES [23]. Moreover, alternative advanced CAES designs have also been studied such as isothermal CAES, CAES paired with cogeneration of heat and power, CAES with humidification, and trigeneration CAES systems [24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

Prototype of Pico Hydro – Solar Photovoltaic Hybrid System

“…Generally, power generating systems that are widely used for HPP are diesel generators, solar photovoltaic (SPV), microhydro, and power plant. HPP is a solution to overcome the fuel crisis and the lack of electricity in remote areas, small islands and also in urban areas [6]. The illustration of hybrid photovoltaic-wind energy system is shown in Figure 2.…”