Adequacy-based Design of A Hybrid Generating System Including Intermittent Sources Using Constrained Particle Swarm Optimization

Renewable sources of energy have recently gained significant interest primarily due to traditional fuels' climbing prices, worries about the future oil supply, and increasing environmental concerns. However, some of these alternative energy sources are intermittent and their penetration may compromise the power system reliability. Thus, it poses a great challenge to achieve a cost-effective, emission-reduced, and reliable hybrid generation system. Due to the fluctuation of renewable power sources and the possible generator failures, it becomes necessary to carry out the reliability evaluation in the design stage to ensure the designed system has a certain degree of reliability in the presence of uncertainties. In this paper, three reliability indices for generating system adequacy assessment are used as design constraints or objectives in order to achieve reliability assurance during system operations. A modified multi-objective particle swarm optimization procedure is proposed to derive a set of Pareto-optimal system configurations in terms of cost and reliability. A numerical example is also presented to verify the validity and applicability of the proposed method.