Modeling and Simulation of a PV-Diesel-Battery System for a Standalone Microgrid

This paper presents a standalone Photovoltaic (PV)-diesel-battery system for a resort island. The system is designed to meet the demand for a typical load for islands in the South China Sea. The location selected is Tioman Island as it represents typical resort island within the South China Sea. The populations in these areas depends on diesel generations for electricity that have unpredictable prices, high operation costs, and high amount of greenhouse gasses such as CO2. However, these islands have potential for installation of PV and other renewable energy (RE) generations due to the land sizes and abundance of renewable resources. Hence, this study aims to develop a PV model to simulate the performance of an actual system deployed on the island. The system comprises of a 1 MW PV array, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) based on incremental conductance method that are connected to 11 kV distribution network. The model utilizes actual renewable resource input such as irradiance and temperature to simulate the potential PV system generation. Moreover, actual load profile used to demonstrate the capability of a PV system to satisfy the island's load demand. This model is highly customizable where PV model, MPPT algorithm can be varied to simulate performance of other configurations.