Standalone hybrid system energy management optimization for remote village considering methane production from livestock manure

Abstract

Recently, many efforts have been done to overcome increasing fuel consumption. One of the vital solutions is utilization of standalone renewable energy resources hybrid systems. This paper attempts to develop a cost-effective methodology to ascertain optimal design and energy management for a remote village. Different energy resources such as wind and solar, fuel cell, and energy storage systems are employed to satisfy total demands including agriculture, residential, school, and health center. Different hydrogen production methods are proposed to verify the efficiency of the developed methodology. In the proposed village, different waste types such as rice husk, maize straw, livestock, and residential wastes are used to generate the required hydrogen for fuel cells to generate electricity. The main objective of the proposed methodology is minimizing the total cost of the village including total costs of each Distributed Generation (DG), cost of natural gas consumption, penalty for interruption the demands, and cost of CO2 emission. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to solve the optimization problem by minimizing the total system costs while the customers required Loss of Power Supply Probability (LPSP) is satisfied. The suggested hybrid system not only increases the renewable energy penetration but also decreases the natural gas consumption. The results achieved in the course of the present study depict that utilization of energy produced from different types of wastes plays a significant role in conserving fossil fuels and overcoming the fossil fuels depletion. It is concluded from the results that there is about a 17.46% reduction in natural gas consumption when all available waste is utilized. In addition, considering 100% availability for the animal manure reduces the natural gas consumption by reformer from 2.373 to 1.605 million liters which means reduction of the natural gas consumption is 32.35%. The results conclude that H2 produced by livestock waste is dominating among available wastes. However, there is about 18% reduction in the Cost of Energy (COE), when 100% availability is considered for this type of waste.