RELIABILITY ANALYSIS OF HYBRID ENERGY SYSTEM

A hybrid energy system integrates renewable energy sources like wind, solar, microhydro and biomass, fossil fuel power generators such as diesel generators and energy storage. Hybrid energy system is an excellent option for providing electricity for remote and rural locations where access to grid is not feasible or economical. Reliability and cost-effectiveness are the two most important objectives when designing a hybrid energy system. One challenge is that the existing methods do not consider the time-varying characteristics of the renewable sources and the energy demand over a year, while the distributions of a power source or demand are different over the period, and multiple power sources can often times complement one another. In this paper, a reliability analysis method is developed to address this challenge, where wind and solar are the two renewable energy sources that are considered. The cost evaluation of hybrid energy systems is presented. A numerical example is used to demonstrate the proposed method.