Design of installation capacity evaluation mechanism for hybrid energy generation system

Abstract

This study presents a simple evaluation mechanism for the installation capacity of a hybrid energy generation system. The mechanism is mainly applicable to hybrid energy sources, including wind power, photovoltaic (PV), and fuel cells (FC). Demand power is mainly supplied by the PV and wind power, and backup power in case of an emergency is provided by the FC generation system. The aim of the hybrid energy generation system is to suppress the penalty bill caused by exceeding the contract power capacity with the power company and to supply the backup power when needed. According to different installation locations of the hybrid energy generation system, a simple evaluation mechanism for the installation capacity is designed by considering the concept of capacity factor and cost recovery to obtain the ratio of installation capacity. The performance of the proposed evaluation mechanism is verified by numerical simulations of a real campus in Taiwan. The comparison of the proposed evaluation mechanism with two dispatch methods via the rate of capacity factor and the rate of power generation cost is done on the equal basis of 104 kW power requirement provided by the PV and wind power generation systems to avoid the penalty for exceeding its contractual power capacity, and the capacity factors (10.7 and 34.33%) for the PV and wind power generation systems. Numerical results show that the proposed evaluation mechanism has about (45.5%/13.3%) and (18.2%/20%) self‐use/selling payback year improvements than two conventional dispatch methods, respectively. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 33: 1322–1331, 2014