Abstract
•Nine hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES) for providing electricity and hydrogen demands in Neom city in Saudi Arabia are proposed.•Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) has been applied to identify the best hybrid. renewable energy system for a certain load in Neom city.•The reliability of TOPSIS multi-criteria decision-making is proved compared with Weighted Aggregated Sum Product WASPA, MOORA, and EDAS.•The HRES based on solar PV, diesel generator (DG), and battery (BES) was the best case in terms of energy, economic, and environmental (3E).
In this work, nine case studies for hybrid energy systems (HESs) were considered and analyzed to supply a certain load. The load demand contains an electrical load and hydrogen production for industrial applications in Neom city. The simulation and optimization of the considered HESs are performed using HOMER Pro software. The obtained optimized results were very close for some cases based on the economic, environmental, and social assessment. Multicriteria decision-making based on a different approach of weight such as no priority, CRITIC, Entropy, and TOPSIS techniques were used to decide the best-case study among the different nine cases. Moreover, extra techniques such as Weighted Aggregated Sum Product WASPA, MOORA, and EDAS were used to confirm the TOPSIS technique's results. The results show that the case study contains solar PV, DG, and battery energy storage (BES) was the best case in terms of economic, environmental, and social assessment. The levelized costs of energy and hydrogen for the best HES were 0.4 $/kWh and 21 $, respectively. The CO2 emission was 45912 kg/year which equivalent to saving 118,074 gallons of diesel.