Economic Analysis of Hybrid Wind/PV/Diesel/ESS System on a Large Oil Tanker

Due to the global concern on the increasing amount of fossil energy consumed by traditional ships, the application of renewable energy into a ship power system provides a new solution to improve the energy efficiency and to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. This study proposes a stand-alone power system on a large oil tanker including wind generation system, photovoltaic generation system, the diesel generator, and the energy storage system (ESS). Unlike on land, the wind generation on the shipboard not only relies on the natural wind speed but also the ship's course and speed. The installation of the wind turbines on the board is optimally designed, which takes the relative speed into account. In order to mitigate the intermittence of the renewable energy generation, a lead-acid battery serves as the ESS to enhance the stability of the ship power system, and the size is optimized by the multi-objective particle swarm optimization to minimize the whole system cost and CO2 emissions. Additionally, variations of the ship loads are considered with respect to the different operational conditions. Various cases are compared in detail to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm.