Design of a Hybrid Wind-PV-Fuel Cell System for Powering a Desalination Plant

This paper presents a methodology for the design of an autonomous renewable energy system with fuel cell as the back-up generator to supply electricity to a reverse osmosis desalination plant. The sizing of system´s units is based on an operational algorithm that considers the operational features of the system. Since the algorithm generates several workable designs, of importance is only the optimal solution that satisfies all the objectives or provides the best compromise among them. For this purpose, the trade-off method is used to generate multiple plans/solutions under different futures and obtain the trade off curves. Best solutions are selected at the knee of the curve and the optimal solution is the one with the least distance from the origin to the tangent to the curve. A case study is presented to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology.