Determining the Optimal Capacity of Renewable, Non-Renewable, and Storage Resources for the Microgrid Network Considering Certainty

This study aimed to determine the optimal capacity of renewable, non-renewable, and storage resources for the microgrid network considering certainty. The studied system consisted of eight main parts, a DC busbar and an AC busbar. These components include wind turbine units, solar arrays, fuel cells, hydrogen tank, electrolyzer, energy storage, DC/CA converter, and consumed load. The improved particle clustering algorithm was selected as the solution method in this research. The proposed model was a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model (MINLP). Because the objective functions and constraints were nonlinear, the proposed model will be solved using the meta-heuristic method. This problem was solved through MATLAB software. The results indicated that the peak load per month was 66.67 kW. The cheapest way to supply this load is to use wind turbines, so the answer to the problem considered six wind turbine units.

Moreover, due to the difference between the peak generation time of the wind resource and the storage load in fuel cells and hydrogen tanks, it is required to store the excess generation of wind in low load hours and use it to supply load in peak load hours. For this purpose, the capacity of three fuel cells and three hydrogen tanks was determined. Although the diesel generator source can improve the objective function of operation reliability, its capacity has not been determined as a solution due to its higher average investment and operating costs compared to renewable sources. On the other hand, the diesel generator source causes pollution, which leads to the failure of two equivalent objective functions in the operation process.