Optimal utilization of renewable energy-based IPPs for industrial load management

Share of power generation from renewable energy sources has been steadily increasing all over the world, mainly due to the concern about clean environment. Cost of renewable power generation has reduced considerably during the last two decades due to technological advancements and at present some of the renewable energy sources can generate power at costs comparable with that of fossil fuels. In this paper, application of renewable energy-based power generation is proposed, for load management. The formulation utilizes non-linear programming technique for minimizing the electricity cost and reducing the peak demand, by supplementing power by renewable energy sources, satisfying the system constraints. Case study of twenty-two large-scale industries showed that, significant reduction in peak demand (about 34%) and electricity cost (about 14%) can be achieved, by the optimal utilization of the renewable energy from independent power producers (IPPs). (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved