Placement and sizing optimization for PV-battery-diesel hybrid systems

This paper proposes a new method to determine the placement and sizing of diesel generators (DGs), photovoltaic solar panels (PV) and batteries for off-grid systems. In this work, our objective is to reduce the total system cost while fulfilling the load demand and mantaining the grid power quality, among other constraints. This is achieved by employing two particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, the first for placement and sizing of the devices and the second for their scheduling. Three case studies — only DGs, DGs + PV and DGs + PV + batteries systems — based on the energy requirements of an Indonesian island are presented. In addition, real solar irradiance and temperature data are applied together with a residential load profile. The results reveal that a system which relies only on DGs is not able to keep the values of grid voltage within the tolerable range (from 0.95 p.u. to 1.05 p.u.) and a total cost of 5.8×106 USD is required. The DGs + PV system demands a lower cost, 5.2×106 USD. Nevertheless, the grid voltage reaches values lower to 0.95 p.u. for certain nodes during night time as the PV are not able to provide local power. Finally, the DGs + PV + batteries system requires the lowest cost, 4.3×106 USD, and is able to keep the values of the grid voltage within the desired range as now batteries can provide local power at night time.