Designing a wind-diesel hybrid remote area power supply (RAPS) system

Studies have shown that the integration of wind power into traditionally diesel-only remote area power supply (RAPS) systems can significantly reduce the harmful emissions and life-cycle costs. There has been increasing levels of research into improving the efficiencies of the system components, but unfortunately the actual design of a hybrid wind-diesel system still appears to be quite a grey area. Numerous papers have been published and programs written for optimal sizing using genetic algorithms or probabilistic techniques but incorporate generalisations so large that the solution is thus void. This paper demonstrates techniques that make system design quite intuitive, thereby nulling many common constraints and providing a focus on user-understanding as it is the user that designs the system, as opposed to a Black Box optimisation algorithm. A program has been developed to facilitate this task and is showcased herein..