Optimal Configuration with Capacity Analysis of a Hybrid Renewable Energy and Storage System for an Island Application

Abstract

The Philippines consists of 7100 islands, many of which still use fossil fuel diesel generators as the main source of electricity. This supply can be complemented by the use of renewable energy sources. This study uses a Philippine offshore island to optimize the capacity configuration of a hybrid energy system (HES). A thorough investigation was performed to understand the operating status of existing diesel generator sets, load power consumption, and collect the statistics of meteorological data and economic data. Using the Hybrid Optimization Models for Energy Resources (HOMER) software we simulate and analyze the techno-economics of different power supply systems containing stand-alone diesel systems, photovoltaic (PV)-diesel HES, wind-diesel HES, PV-wind-diesel HES, PV-diesel-storage HES, wind-diesel-storage HES, PV-wind-diesel-storage HES. In addition to the lowest cost of energy (COE), capital cost, fuel saving and occupied area, the study also uses entropy weight and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method to evaluate the optimal capacity configuration. The proposed method can also be applied to design hybrid renewable energy systems for other off-grid areas.Energies 2020, 13, 8 2 of 28 energy may fulfill the low load requirements, while these systems need a significant energy storage for higher loads, resulting in high COE [17][18][19]. The other option to alleviate this problem is autonomous hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES) which combine two or more energy resources, to fulfill higher energy requirements of off-grid areas and resolve the inherent problem of single renewable energy (RE) resource [1,[20][21][22][23][24]. Furthermore, hybridization of energy sources increases the reliability of the system as the shortcomings of any component are compensated for by the selection of other but appropriate components and their sizing is essential during design of such systems [25][26][27]. Some of the hybrid energy systems with different storage technologies and performance measure criteria found in literatures are presented in Table 1 [ 12,28,29].

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