The use of renewable energy with storage systems is particularly important in small and unreliable grids, such as islands. This paper reports sizing of a photovoltaic (PV) power plant with storage system for Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus through technical and economic analyses. PV system was modeled considering fixed tilted, one-axis and two-axis tracking systems using hourly data. Energy storage system was included in the model to overcome the temporal mismatch between the electricity demand of the campus and the electricity supplied by the PV system. The reduction in CO2 emissions by deploying these systems was studied. The results showed that although it would not be economically feasible to meet the entire demand of the campus, a PV system of 4.5 MW with 15 MWh of storage size would generate enough electricity to meet the demand for 83% of the time in a year, yielding the cost of 0.25 USD/kWh.
Deploying renewable energy systems (RES) to supply electricity faces many challenges related to cost and the variability of the renewable resources. One possible solution to these challenges is to hybridize RES with conventional power systems and include energy storage units. In this study, the feasibility analysis of a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV)-wind-battery hybrid system is presented as a microgrid for a university campus-scale community on a Mediterranean island. Models for PV and wind turbine systems are presented to estimate energy production, and net present cost (NPC) and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) are used as economic metrics. A parametric study is performed with hourly time-steps to determine the sizes of energy generation and storage units to minimize the NPC for a small community as the case study. Two alternate configurations with and without storage are proposed. In both cases, the resulting LCOE is 0.15 USD/kWh while the current electricity tariff for the analyzed location was 0.175 USD/kWh in 2015. This lower unit cost of electricity leads to a lower NPC considering a 25-year lifetime. Different estimated and measured solar irradiance and wind speed data sets are used to evaluate the performance of the designed microgrid. Sensitivity analysis on different available weather data sets shows that the uncertainty in wind resource estimations is much higher than the uncertainty in solar resource estimations. Moreover, the results show that solar and wind resources could be utilized synergistically for the studied location.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.