Development of cost-effective energy management strategy for stand-alone hybrid system

Abstract

Deployment of Photovoltaic (PV) and Wind Turbine (WT) as a stand-alone system are the most affordable solution to the electrification problem in the rural areas. However, the main challenge that hinder the sustainability of PV and WT is the output fluctuation. Thus, the battery and the non-Renewable Energy (RE) sources are required to make sure the continuous supply to the load is met. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose the rule-based Energy Management Strategy (EMS) for the stand-alone hybrid system in order to ensure the continuity of supply and the minimum utilization of non-RE can be achieved. The continuous monitoring is designed to avoid the degradation of battery performance while minimizing the non-RE cost. The efficient Stage of Charge (SoC) limit of battery is investigated and applied in this study to store the excess RES power effectively. In this paper, the diesel fired Microturbine (MT) is selected as a non-RE source to integrate into the stand-alone hybrid system that consists of PV, WT and battery. The result shows that the proposed rule-based EMS for the in the stand-alone hybrid system is able to reduce the cost of MT operation to a minimum. Restricting the SoC limits effects the use of MT.