Improving the power quality and hydrogen production from renewable energy sources based microgrid

Abstract

The world is looking for utilization of renewable energy sources to reduce global warming as well as the consumption of fossil fuels. In this scenario, solar and wind energy are widely used at many places worldwide. However, both solar irradiance and wind speed are depending on nature. Hence, an energy storage device must be required to operate at their best utilization level by converting them to electricity. One of the best energy storage devices for medium power range is the battery. However, batteries require high maintenance and suffering from self-discharge as well as storage capacity will be decreased day by day. Hence, storing hydrogen can be an economically feasible solution instead of using batteries for high power range. Usually an aqua electrolyzer can easily convert water to hydrogen and oxygen through electricity. However, due to slow dynamics of heat transfer from electricity, the generation of hydrogen cannot meet the fast response like electrical devices. Therefore, a novel controlling technique is required to increase the production quality of hydrogen during random changes in both solar irradiance and wind speed. In order to achieve the best utilization, both photovoltaic panels and wind turbines are operated at their maximum power point levels. In this research boost converters are used to operate as maximum power point tracking devices. The whale optimization technique is integrated to respective controllers of all the converters to achieve stable production of hydrogen during rapid changes in irradiance and wind speed. The Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) technique is compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) to show the benefits of tracking response of the system on improving production of hydrogen from hybrid renewable energy sources based Microgrid. Hardware—in the—Loop (HIL) is developed to analyze the results with the help of OPAL-RT modules. Along with HIL results, a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) based results are also presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.