Optimizing a Green and Sustainable Off-grid Energy System Design Enhancing with a Real Case

Abstract

In recent years, unquestionable warnings like the negative impacts of CO2 emissions, the necessity of utilizing sustainable energy sources, and the rising demand for municipal electrification have been issued. In this study, by incorporating two significant assumptions, such as electricity production in close proximity to the business location and only renewable energy resource usage, a modest off-grid hybrid energy system is designed. To construct the system, a number of elements such as wind generators (WG), photovoltaic arrays (PV), battery banks, and bi-directional converters are taken into account. Moreover, a real case in Malmö, Sweden, is considered. To optimize the system, a bi-objective problem is developed, and it is solved by proposing a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach to provide the load requirements (with a maximum allowance of 0.1% unmet) for a nearby supermarket (approximately 1000 m2). Moreover, to verify the obtained results, the developed system is simulated using HOMER Pro software, and the results are compared and discussed. The contribution of this study is to provide off-grid or local clients around the world with a dependable and affordable option by minimizing both the baseline cost of energy and the net current expenditure in the desired system. The best-obtained results by the proposed PSO offered 160 PVs, 5 WGs, and 350 batteries, respectively, while the best solution found by the simulation method was using 384 PVs, 5 WGs, and 189 batteries for the considered off-grid system.