Hybrid PSO-FA Optimization for Photovoltaic and Biomass Systems with Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Water Treatment Plant

Water treatment plant (WTP) is a vital sector of the economy which uses electricity for its various treatment processes to guarantee that treated water is delivered to the consumers. One of the critical issues facing industrial customers especially the WTPs are the penalty charges imposed by the utility provider if the plant fails to meet the declared maximum demand (MD). Since most WTPs have open land areas and exposed surfaces, it can be utilized for renewable energy (RE) harvesting and integration. It is important to determine the proper sizing of these sources to ensure that maximum financial saving can be obtained. In this paper, the optimization of RE sources such as solar PV and biomass as alternative form of energy for WTPs in Malaysia is investigated. This research proposes the hybrid optimization technique PSO-FA to optimize the RE sources size to obtain maximum financial saving per year. A comparative investigation is carried out against the PSO and FA to determine the performance of the hybrid optimization technique. Three different scenarios are investigated to emulate the practical scenario in which the first scenario considers all three sources, the second scenario considers only the solar PV and biomass, and the third scenario is for biomass and BESS alone. The analysis is carried out by considering different years for Return of investment (ROI) to investigate the correlation between the RE source sizing and the financial saving. The proposed system is carried out based on the existing WTP as the test system and proposed method is validated in MATLAB. The results show that the proposed hybrid PSO-FA technique is able to provide the highest total saving for 89% of the time while satisfying the system constraints.