Hybrid Renewable Energy System Model Using HOMER as Support to the Power Crisis in the Philippines

Abstract

Electricity has become a part of daily people's lives and also the most convenient form of energy to use for daily essentials. As a result of increasing population, the peak demand for power is also increasing, thus requiring more power plants to provide electricity. Power plant outages also result in thin power reserves that result in several yellow and red alert warnings in April 2019. Photovoltaic and wind sources which are readily available sources and unlimited can be used for energy generation. Using HOMER (Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Electric Renewables), models are developed using solar energy and wind energy as energy resources. The most efficient hybrid system (photovoltaic-battery, wind turbine-battery, and photovoltaic-wind turbine-battery) is determined at three different types of terrain (sea level, above sea level, seaside). The most efficient hybrid modeled which has the lowest cost of energy (COE) at each terrain are; a 5.38 kW solar PV, 1 kW wind turbine, 35×1 kWh L.A. battery, and 1×2.12 kW converter which cost P14.95/kWh for the sea-level location; a 5.70 kW solar PV, 1 kW wind turbine, 40×1 kWh L.A. battery, and 2.09 kW converter which costs P16.32/kWh for above sea-level location; and a 7.65 kW solar PV, 36×1 kWh L.A battery with a 2.2 kW converter which costs P15.50/kWh for seaside location. The capacity factor for photovoltaic and battery has the highest average capacity factor of 18.6627 and 17.4228 for seaside and sea-level location respectively, while hybrid photovoltaic and wind turbines for above sea level location at 46.3348.