Impact of dust events on the optimization of photovoltaic-wind hybrid system in desert

Abstract

Reliable optimization of renewable energy systems has to be adapted to the installation site and its environmental factors. In dust event sources, the impact of dust on solar irradiance or on system’s production is not usually taken into consideration during optimization of photovoltaic (PV) or PV-wind hybrid systems. The first objective of this paper was to make observatory studies on wind velocity and lifting of Saharan dust that characterize Algerian desert which allowed us to extract a wind threshold for each event in our desert site. The second objective was to quantify this dust suspension and its negative impact, up to 47.46% on global solar irradiance (GSI) and 48.95% on photovoltaic yield effects were observed. The third and main objective of this paper was evaluating changes in optimized system when the dust impact was taken into account. To achieve that we adjusted GSI satellite data on HOMER software to dust presence, and then we run an optimization on HOMER with its GSI database and the new data, this data adjustment leads to a significant expansion of 13.70% on the size of PV generator, also 7.66% and 7.68% increase on the investment expenses and cost of energy respectively. Results obtained on this paper can be used to make PV-hybrid system’s technical and financial optimization in the main Algerian dust source trustworthy.