Simple Approach on Intermixing Solar and Wind Energy and Minimizing Their Intermittent Effect

Abstract

Renewable energy resources especially wind and solar energy are emerging as the modern power sources to electrify remote areas. The main reason behind their emergence is due to their environment-friendly behavior, unlimited availability and short period for replenishment over nonrenewable energy resources. Renewable energy resources are much better than nonrenewable energy resources, but the intermittency in renewable energy resources degrades the system performance. In order to overcome the intermittency, multiple hybrid system techniques were proposed in literature that can achieve suitable results but have disadvantages of complicated control structures and high implementation cost. Considering aforementioned shortcomings, a simple balancing approach is proposed to intermix solar and wind energy together so as to utilize the available energy from both sources at a given time. It is very common that solar farms are the dominating source of energy in daytime and summer, while wind farms are the dominating source of energy at night and in winter. The proposed approach delivers maximum possible power to the load by combining dominating and non-dominating resources all the time, hence mitigating the intermittency of individual resources. Compared with other approaches, the proposed approach offers key benefits with redundancy, simple design and low cost, which can be analyzed from simulation results.