Abstract
This paper shows an application of hybrid PV/wind energy and battery storage in the islanded area. This work’s main target allows the distributed energy resources to contribute efficiently in the economic feasibility and enhance the environmental impact of the hybrid renewable energy source. Several factors such as levelized cost of energy (COE), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and loss of power supply probability are studied. A combined solution is to compromise the economic and environmental aspects via the Utopia point approach is investigated. The optimal configuration of the hybrid PV/wind along with battery-storage and diesel engine as secondary source is obtained via meta-heuristic optimizers: Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle-Swarm Optimization (PSO) and impartial comparison of the results with HOMER software. The results of Utopia point solution show that the PV (about 46%) and wind turbine (about 13%) are shared significantly as primary renewable sources and battery storage (about 39%) as storage options. Meanwhile, the diesel engine (about 3%) has insignificant sharing in feeding the demand load. The optimal COE and GHG, which are achieved via GA and PSO optimization techniques are 0.182$/kWh and 12076 kg/year, agansit 0.343$/kWh and 17618 kg/year that are obtained via HOMER software, respectively. This corssponing to 47% and 31% reduction in COE and GHG, respectively. Sensitivity studies demonstrate that the variation of the wind energy sharing from 50 to 150% shows that the wind energy has a slight effect considering the GHG emissions. Contrarily, lower PV sharing ratios undesirably raises the levelized COE, however, reduces the GHG emissions.