Optimum unit sizing of wind-PV-battery system components in a typical residential home

Abstract

Optimal unit sizing of generation units in small off-grid systems is an important aspect to minimize total annual cost. This can be applied to wind, photovoltaic (PV), and hybrid wind-PV power generating systems to meet power demand for a residential home constructed at a specific site located in remote hilly areas in Turkey's northwest Black Sea coast where no grid extension is available. It is obvious that unit sizing of a standalone wind-PV system simply requires an optimization task to determine the optimal generation capacity and battery storage for a typical load profile. In optimization process, power demand, wind speed, and insolation rate are annually averaged hourly estimated values for the given site. The six combinations of PV alone, wind alone and hybrid wind-PV systems are optimally sized to both meet load demand and minimize total cost for 20-year lifetime projection using the real-coded genetic algorithms. The results indicated that a hybrid system with a 3 kW wind turbine and three 0.25 kW PV panel was the best configuration to reduce total annual cost to an affordable price for the specific example.