Optimal Sizing and Management of Hybrid Renewable Energy System for Highways Lighting

Abstract

The energy consumption for the purpose of lighting has comprised about 30% of energy consumption and around 45% to 50% of peak load in Iran. Based on the statistics of the road maintenance and transportation organization of Iran (RMTO), the quantity of installed lighting equipment had significant growth in recent years. An appropriate combination of renewable energy resources leads to reliable, green and economic generation system. Using hybrid solar-wind systems to supply street lightings' required energy with low-power lamps is an impressive method to decrease energy consumption. In this paper, a comprehensive study is carried out to achieve an optimal design for a hybrid solar-wind system that supplies electricity to the roads and highways lights in Iran. In the proposed approach, to achieve an optimum design for the hybrid system, suitable options for each part of the system is selected according to its technical specifications, and then the capacity and the number of components is determined in order to minimize an objective function comprised of a cost function, loss of power supply probability (LPSP) and subject to satisfy prevailing technical constraints. Bat algorithm (BA) is employed to solve the proposed optimization problem. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in various situations of operation for the case study of Tabriz city regard to pertaining load profile and weather data. The case study is categorized into three scenarios in which the hybrid system has different schemes, and the results show that the proposed hybrid system is notably practical and cost-effective to supply electrical energy of highway and street lightings.