A Techno-Economic Comparison of a Stand-alone Hybrid System for a Household: A Case Study for the Royal Commission in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The trend is now to use renewable energy sources to improve energy efficiency in the building sector and preserve the environment. The use of sources as renewable off-grid applications for driven applications in home sector (micro-grids) is very interesting nowadays. The economic factor and the cost of establishing these grids is the main obstacle to these investments. One of the key solutions to reduce the cost and increase the reliability of these grids is how to optimally determine the ratings and combination of some renewable sources based on the location of the house. This paper presents an effective techno-economical design of a stand-alone hybrid system. The system contains a photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine, battery, and diesel generator. This design is performed through an extensive examination of the techno-economical design of a standalone system to provide the desired energy load for a typical household building for both Albaha and Buraydah cities in Saudi Arabia. These two cities have different geographical locations as Albaha is located at latitude 20.0217 degrees north while Buraydah is located at 26.3592 degrees north. These two cities were selected due to the difference in their geographical locations to study the effect of the weather on the building performance in terms of cost of energy, energy penetration, and load met. To enhance the performance of the proposed hybrid system, some constraints were selected, such as Net Present Cost (NPC), and Total Annual Cost (TAC). Results demonstrate that stand-alone hybrid renewable energy systems can be applied to improve energy efficiency and economics of the existing buildings. Integration of PV system, wind turbine, battery, and diesel generator in the best configuration can provide a minimum cost of energy of about $0.596/kWh and $0.603/kWh for Albaha and Buraydah cities, respectively.