Sizing of a stand-alone photovoltaic/wind energy system with hydrogen and battery storage based on improved ant colony algorithm

This paper presents an improved ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for sizing a stand-alone hybrid photovoltaic (PV)/wind turbine (WT)/battery/hydrogen system. The hydrogen subsystem consisting of fuel cell (FC), electrolyzer and hydrogen tank, stores or supplies energy like battery. In this paper, the model of the hybrid system components and the system operation strategy are introduced, two objectives that take minimum system cost and maximal system reliability described as loss of power supply probability (LPSP) have been designed and an improved ACO algorithm with an extra step sorting temporary results in each iteration has been proposed for the solution of optimal sizing problem. Finally, a simulation experiment has been done to demonstrate the validity of the improved ACO with the data from an island of Zhejiang, China.