Integrated Renewable Energy System for Stand-Alone Operations with Optimal Load Dispatch Strategy

Abstract

The hybrid system configuration is used for meeting the thermal and electrical load demands of an off-grid network simultaneously with the model proposed in this paper. Li-ion battery, Micro Gas Turbine (MGT), wind turbine and solar photovoltaic configurations are analyzed. Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Electric Renewables (HOMER) software is used for estimating utilization of various strategies for power management, recovered waste heat and excess energy in the model. The heating demand is met and examined by the thermal load controller with and without the options of waste heat recovery. The hybrid system hardware components are sized, compared and analyzed based on cyclic charging (CC) and load following (LF) dispatch strategies. Various electrical to thermal load ratio are considered for examining the system performance. Various uncertainties and their effects are reported on comparison of grid-connected and stand-alone options. The hardware components are reduced in size thereby appreciable cost benefits are observed in the results. In the optimized hybrid system, the renewable energy fraction is increased causing high renewable penetrations and the CO2 emission is reduced by a large value. For all the configurations analyzed, several environmental and cost benefits are offered by the CC strategy.