Multi Attribute Investment Planning of a Grid-Connected Diesel/Wind/PV/Battery Hybrid Energy System

Recently, along with the depletion of fossil fuels and growing electrical requirements, more attention has been paid to utilizing Renewable Energy Sources (RESs). Hence, the regulatory rules are in a way to expand the share of RESs in supplying microgrids energy demands. This study reports the optimum investment planning for electrical expansion of a grid-connected tourism complex including diesel/wind/PV/battery technologies. For the optimal planning of microgrid, an efficient simplecomputational two-stage procedure is proposed. In the first stage, all of the feasible system configurations are determined using NREL’s HOMER software which is a well-known and well-established optimal modeling environment. Subsequently, in the second stage based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and simple additive weighting (SAW) method, the best configurations for hybrid system are determined through the Expert Choice software considering economical and environmental criteria. With the aim of providing a comprehensive decision-making capability, a sensitivity analysis is performed considering relative importance of each criterion. Simulation results demonstrate that for the considered complex, the best configuration is grid/diesel/wind hybrid system as it shows a uniform behavior for different cases.