Analysis and Sizing of Mini-Grid Hybrid Renewable Energy System for Islands

This paper aims to investigate the techno-economic feasibility analysis of stand-alone diesel system, stand-alone PV/storage system, PV/diesel hybrid system, PV/diesel/storage hybrid system for the Pratas island in Taiwan. The power supply of outlying islands in Taiwan still use fossil fuel generators. The fuel cost is higher than that of on shore of Taiwan, and it has a great impact on the environment. This problem can be mitigated by hybrid energy systems. Through the investigation to know the existing generator set and Photovoltaic (PV) operating status, load consumption, etc., the study collects the required data for statistical meteorological analysis and economic analysis, and uses Hybrid Optimization Models for Energy Resources (HOMER) to simulate techno-economics of the stated hybrid energy systems. The analysis contains the capital cost, net present cost (NPC), cost of energy (COE) and fuel saving in different capacities for each power supply system with different constraints. From the simulation results, the lowest COE is 0.3569 $/kWh that can be found at the PV/diesel hybrid system configuration scheme with a total PV system capacity of 200 kWp, the renewable fraction (RF) is 15.3% and the excess electricity fraction is 2.6%, which is lower than the generally acceptable 5%. Although the COE of PV/diesel/storage hybrid is higher than that of stand-alone diesel system, the annual total CO2 emissions is reduced by 31.63%, which is of great benefit to environmental protection.