Design Optimization of Energy Hub for Electricity and Fuel Production

Abstract

Nowadays, Renewable energy resources are playing a significant role in presenting the best alternative source for energy production. Not only they provide a clean source of energy with no emissions, but they are also offering the electricity and fuel at an affordable price to the end users. Additionally, the concept of hybrid systems integrating various renewable resources has become a dominant approach for investors, decision makers, engineers and researchers to work on. In this thesis, a technical-economic analysis based on modeling, simulation is conducted to achieve the best sizing optimization of the components of the hybrid off-grid system. The main components of this system are solar panels, wind turbines, electrolyzer, fuel cells and hydrogen cylinders. The primary sources for energy production are Solar PV modules and wind turbine generators. The hydrogen system acts as an energy storage element for producing energy in times of lack of generation for the system. A novel method named “Deterministic Balanced Method” is introduced which is based on integration of power ratings of the system components to get the total annual energy production for project lifetime. This method is used in comparison with the results of other software tools such as HOMER and SAM. Then, verification of the sizing optimization results for the conducted methods is achieved through comparing the power ratings and annual energy production This thesis has also included a real case study of the use of hybrid renewable energy generation systems in Cairo International Airport, after considering amount of solar radiation and wind speed collected by international weather data platforms such as NASA and METEONMRM. System design was also based on an actual load studied and represented to ensure the feasibility of this study. Finally, a power management control technique is applied to the hydrogen system to schedule the devices’ time of operation and decrease their degradations rates due to the switching operations.