A Comparison of Techno-economic Analysis of a Hybrid Renewable Energy Supply Options for Grid-connected Buildings : Case Study

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to investigate the potential of reducing the dependence on the consumed energy from the main grid using a Hybrid Renewable Energy System (HRES) at two university’s locations, namely; Al Baha University and University of Bahrain. The feasibility analysis of a HRES includes technical and economic features, which is examined for photovoltaic array (PV), wind turbine (WT), DC/AC converter, and battery banks at autonomous and grid-connected modes. The simulation results address that the developed system at University of Bahrain has the lowest Net Present Cost (NPC) and Cost of Energy (COE). It can be recognized from the simulation results that NPC of a developed Grid/PV system is more appropriate than other configurations, at the current tariff, which results a renewable fraction of more than 30% and 54.3% reduction in CO 2 . University of Bahrain has the optimized system of integration of 36 kW PV array with the main grid which leads to the minimum cost of energy (COE) of 0.0749 $/kWh. The study also provides an optimal configuration of HRES-only system to cover the full load demand (>99.9%) by a contribution from solar PV by 74.8%, wind energy shares 15% of load demand, and 10.2% from battery. The study addresses two major contributions. Firstly, the lowest COE determines the optimal configurations for fully supply the load at different locations of the university’s buildings. Then, it applies the feasibility and sensitivity analyses for several case studies such as payback time, tariff changes, and load demand variation.