Assessment of renewable energy based micro-grids for small communities

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2016-7
Sadati, S.M. Sajed
Deploying renewable energy systems to supply electricity faces many challenges related to cost and variability of the renewable resources. One possible solution to these challenges is to hybridize renewable energy systems with conventional power systems and include energy storage systems. In this study, the feasibility analysis of two cases for electricity generation systems as (i) photovoltaic (PV)-battery-pumped hydro system (PHS) and (ii) PV-wind-battery are presented as a Renewable Energy Micro-Grid (REMG) for a university campus-scale community on a Mediterranean island. The island has an isolated grid which generally utilizes fuel-oil based steam and diesel electric generators. Models for PV, wind turbine, battery and PHS systems are presented to estimate energy production, and net present cost (NPC) and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) as economic metrics in the feasibility analysis. As a case study, Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) with an average power demand of about 1 MW is considered. A parametric study is performed using a newly developed model for combining short-term and long-term energy storage systems integrated with PV systems for case (i) and HOMER software for case (ii) to determine the sizes of the components for the REMG. Both models are using hourly time-steps. In case (i), battery and PHS are considered as short- and long- term storage systems. For the studied ranges and considering the availability of water resources required for PHS, the lowest NPC of 40.65M USD is found for a configuration with 2.7 MW PV, 0.3 MWh battery and 2.5 MWh PHS. In case (ii), among all the configurations, two alternate configurations are proposed, one with storage and one without storage. Both configurations have identical NPCs of 38.3M USD, renewable energy fractions of 38% and 36%, respectively, and avoid approximately 4000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. The system without storage consists of a 2 MW PV plant and 3 MW wind power system, and the system with storage consists of a 2 MW PV system, 3.75 MW wind power system and a 1 MWh battery. In both cases, the resulting LCOE is approximately 0.15 USD/kWh whilst the electricity tariff for METU NCC is approximately 0.175 USD/kWh.

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Citation Formats
S. M. S. Sadati, “Assessment of renewable energy based micro-grids for small communities,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2016.