Management of a hybrid renewable power plant supplying an isolated rural load within a changing environment

Authors: HICHEM AZLI, MOHAMED MOSTEFAI

Abstract: Often, authors deal with the sizing issue of hybrid power plants on horizons of several years. Proposed approaches are certainly essential to optimize energy costs. However, these solutions cannot remain optimal throughout the life cycle of the plant due to the inevitable evolution of the number of households, their consumption profiles, and possible degradation of a part of the plant. In this paper, an efficient management strategy of a sized hybrid renewable system is developed. It is based on the scheduling of the different resources of the plant. The main aim is to minimize the generated energy cost while ensuring an optimal quality of service and taking into account the evolution of the environment. The scheduling issue was modeled as a constrained quadratic problem and solved using the interior-point-convex algorithm. To show the effectiveness of the approach, several scenarios representing the changing context have been developed and implemented on an existing power plant. Obtained results were compared with the case of energy dispatch without management and significant energy cost savings was noticed. This work provides an efficient decision aid tool for the microgrid manager and fits well with the general policy of smart grids.

Keywords: Energy management, scheduling problem, hybrid power system, PV/wind turbine/battery/diesel power system, renewable energy

Full Text: PDF