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Optimization and control of autonomous renewable energy systems
Author(s) -
Chedid R.,
Saliba Y.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
international journal of energy research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.808
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1099-114X
pISSN - 0363-907X
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-114x(199607)20:7<609::aid-er176>3.0.co;2-o
Subject(s) - renewable energy , automotive engineering , diesel generator , controller (irrigation) , wind power , engineering , computer science , diesel fuel , reliability engineering , electrical engineering , agronomy , biology
Recently, there has been a growing interest in harnessing renewable energy resources particularly for electricity generation. One of the main concerns in the design of an electric power system that utilizes renewable energy sources, is the accurate selection of system components that can economically satisfy the load demand. This depends on the load that ought to be met, the capacity of renewable resources, the available space for wind machines and solar panels, and the capital and running costs of system components. Once size optimization is achieved, the autonomous system must be controlled in order to correcly match load requirements with instantaneous variation of input energy. In this paper, a new formulation for optimizing the design of an autonomous wind‐solar‐diesel‐battery energy system is developed. This formultation employs linear programming techniques to minimize the average production cost of electricity while meeting the load requirements in a reliable manner. The computer program developed reads the necessary input data, formulates the optimization problem by computing the coefficients of the objective function and the constraints and provides the optimum wind, solar, diesel, and battery ratings. In order to study the effect of parameters predefined by the designer on the optimum design, several sensitivity analysis studies are performed, and the effects of the expected energy not served, the load level, the maximum available wind area, the maximum available solar area, and the diesel engines' lifetime are investigated. A controller the monitors the operation of the autonomous system is designed. The operation of this controller is based on three major policies; in the first, batteries operate before diesel engines and hence the storage system acts as a fuel saver, while in the second diesel engines are operated first so that the unmet energy is lower but the fuel cost is high. According to the third policy, the supply is made through diesel engines only. This is done for the purpose of making a performance comparison between the isolated diesel system and the hybrid renewable energy system. The proposed optimization and control techniques are tested on Lebanese data. Although three different control policies have been adopted in this work, the software is able to accommodate other policies.