Economic Analysis of Stand-Alone Hybrid Wind/PV/Diesel Water Pumping System: A Case Study in Egypt

Abstract

The design and evaluation of a stand-alone hybrid renewable energy system for pumping underground water for small farm irrigation is presented. Given environmental conditions, system specifications and daily load demand data, the optimal size of main system components is obtained using a sizing algorithm. Different renewable energy systems are compared using yearly simulations, on hourly base via specialized commercial software simulation packages PVSYST and HOMER, to simulate the system performance and to reach the optimum configurations based on the objective criteria. The criteria used in economic optimization are the net present cost and the cost of energy, with the percent of the capacity shortage. The following systems can be compared: PV only, PV with horizontal axis wind turbine, PV with vertical axis wind turbine, and PV with horizontal axis wind turbine and diesel generator and diesel generator only. The simulation also was carried out for different load patterns for optimum operation. The study was illustrated for climatic conditions of an isolated area in El-Tour City, Sinai, Egypt. The installed 3.42 kW PV water pumping system for irrigation purposes in the same site was also described.