The most-economic design of a hybrid micro-grid considering different load patterns

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the effect of the load pattern on the optimal configuration of a stand-alone PV-Wind hybrid system based on minimum cost is studied. The proposed hybrid system consists mainly of PV modules and wind turbines (WT) in addition to diesel generators (DG) and batteries (BT) for supplying both peak demand and generation shortages. Three different load patterns with the same consumption of energy are proposed to find the most economical design of a stand-alone hybrid system through two optimization techniques: cuckoo search (CS) and white shark (WS). The proposed configurations of stand-alone hybrid systems are as follows: PV/WT, PV/WT/BT, and PV/WT/BT/DG. On the other hand, the load patterns proposed are as follows; daily load, all-day distributed load, and nightly load. Results show that the optimal configuration and the cost are dependent of the load pattern. Also the results show that both of WC and CS have the same steady-state solutions, the differences appear in the number of iterations needed to reach the steady-state.