Techno-economic analysis and size optimization of an off-grid hybrid photovoltaic, fuel cell and diesel generator system

This paper presents multi-objective design of a hybrid system composed of photovoltaic (PV), fuel cell (FC) and diesel generator (DG) to supply electric power of an off-grid community in Kerman, south of Iran in the presence of operating reserve (OR) and uncertainties of load and solar power. Total net present cost (TNPC) and loss of power supply probability (LPSP) are considered as the objectives and the decision variables are the number of PV panels, DGs, FCs, electrolysers and hydrogen tanks. A recently developed meta-heuristic optimizer, multi-objective crow search algorithm (MOCSA), has been utilized to find Pareto front. The impact of different parameters (fuel price, FC system equipments cost, emission cost, etc) has been investigated on the sizing problem. Based on the simulation results, it is observed that integration of hydrogen energy technology will reduce the total cost of the hybrid energy systems. Moreover, the impact of OR on the Pareto front is more than that of load and solar power uncertainties.