Novel Renewable Energy Source in Standalone Microgrid Application with Island Load Management

Abstract

Renewable energy sources, which use natural sources to generate energy, are currently replacing conventional energy sources to fulfil the world’s expanding energy demands. However, photovoltaic and wind energy, which are among these types of energy sources, are not steady and not available for 24 hours in a day. As an alternative, it is possible to extract and use hot water from the earth all the time. Therefore, this study proposes a thermoelectric generator that uses hot water from the hot spring area to generate free electricity as a new renewable energy source in a microgrid application. In this system, the microgrid is standalone without a battery storage system because the thermoelectric generator is in operation for 24 hours in a day (day and night). In this way, the cost of the battery is eliminated by removing it from the system. In this paper, a novel generation method is proposed in microgrid applications as a renewable energy source. In addition, load management system was implemented to control three types of residence loads. The main advantage of this study is to generate electricity from renewable sources like photovoltaic and thermoelectric to demand without much wasting energy by controlled loads according to the proposed load management algorithm. In this study, the microgrid and energy management control is modeled with MATLAB/Simulink. The results showed that the essential load is always active through thermos electric generator besides the absence of battery storage system.