Optimium Planning of Hybrid Renewable Energy System Using HOMER

Abstract

A hybrid renewable energy system may be used to reduce dependency on either conventional energy or renewable system. Optimization of hybrid renewable energy systems looks into the process of selecting the best components and its sizing with appropriate operation strategy to provide cheap, efficient, reliable and cost effective alternative energy. In this paper a methodology has been develop for optimum planning of hybrid PV-Wind system with some battergy backup. The local solar radiation, wind data and components database from different manufactures are analyzed and simulated in HOMER to assess the technical and economic viability of the integrated system. Performance of each component will be evaluated and finally sensitivity analysis will be performed to optimize the system at different conditions. 1. INTRODUCTION The application of renewable energy system has become an important alternative as power provider in rural electrification program [10]. When the conventional sources are depleted and the price of oil reaching its highest level. Applications of renewable energy at this location are through solar radiation via photovoltaic (PV) panels, wind turbines and battery. Initially, the system is a single source system. However a single renewable energy usually tends to be oversized to accommodate load demand. A combination of one or more sources of renewable enegy called hybrid will improve load factors and help on maintainence and replacement costs as the renewable can complement each other [1]. However the evaluation of the correct type of renewable energy system needs to be done so that the system can be optimized [10]. Wide studies have been done to evaluate the competitiveness of renewable energy system as alternatives to the diesel generator such as by Schmid and Hoffman [1]. In literature, several papers have studied the design and planning of hybrid enewable energy system (For example: Paska etal [2009]; Ashok [2007]; Ekrm and Yetkin Ekran [2008]) [11] [12] [13]. The aim of this paper is to present optimum planning of hybrid solar PV and wind renewable system with battery backup and find out the optimum solution of resources based on economics. The approach is based on mathematical modelling of each component, and then the optimization problem is solved by HOMER in order to better manage and control the energy flow so to ensure reliable supply of demand.