Efficiency analysis of stand alone Wind/Photovoltaic hybrid plant architectures

A procedure to compare the performance of Wind/Photovoltaic hybrid plants owning the same PV cell array and wind turbine, but different internal configurations is presented in this paper. The selection of the optimal internal configuration for a hybrid generation plant from renewable energies is a complex task and no widely accepted design tools are today available to compare the features of different possible architectures for a given combination of solar irradiation, wind speed and load profiles. To do this a procedure is proposed based on the evaluation of four performance indexes, namely: the global efficiency, the efficiency in transferring energy from RES to BSS, the efficiency in transferring energy from BSS to load and the fraction of useful renewable energy. The paper is mainly focused on low power hybrid Wind/Photovoltaic plants for distributed generation, however, the proposed procedure may also be adapted to high power systems.