Design and simulation of a hybrid renewable energy system

Linear programming (LP) is used to calculate the sizes of the components of a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) that minimize the present worth of capital and operating costs. The constraints are the energy demand, emissions from the diesel engine, satisfying battery autonomy hours, maintaining system reliability, and keeping a limit on the renewable energy resources. Such formulation uses assumed values for the diesel engine capacity factor, the battery lifetime, the risk factor in the reliability constraint, and the share factor of the renewable resource. When the sizes are obtained from the LP solution, these will be used in a time simulation and the values of these assumptions are reviewed and the LP is solved again in an iterative procedure. Results indicate that after adjusting the assumptions previously set, the cost of the system is further minimized.