Renewable hybrid stand-alone telecom power system modeling and analysis

At the telecom service providers´ installations, the problem of poor grid electricity supply is tackled by using diesel generators. These generators, however, entail a major problem in transportation and storage of diesel with noise pollution. Decentralized distributed generation technologies based on renewable energy resources such as solar photo voltaic (SPV) or/and wind turbine generators (WTG) address the above barriers to a large extent and are therefore considered as emerging alternate power solutions to telecommunication base stations. Three stand-alone SPV power systems using different energy storage technologies i.e. SPV-Battery system, SPV-fuel cell (FC) system and SPV-FC-battery system are optimized, analyzed and compared in this paper. The modeling and sizing optimization of such hybrid systems feeding a stand-alone DC load at a telecom base station has been carried out using HOMER software. SPV system configurations with tracker are also included. Based on the simulation results, it is observed that SPV-FC-Battery hybrid system with maximum power point tracker is most economic solution compared to single storage system. Cost and energy sensitivity with solar radiation data are also analyzed in this paper.