Sizing and techno-economic analysis of hydrokinetic turbine based standalone hybrid energy systems

Abstract Hydrokinetic turbines (HKT’s) are used to generate power from the kinetic energy of flowing water in canals and rivers. This paper proposes a methodology for the optimum sizing of two types of HKT based hybrid energy systems. An HKT-DG-battery system is proposed for the off-grid isolated villages located near to the river or canal. The entire set of feasible design options known as design space is identified for an HKT-DG-battery system using a MATLAB algorithm involving the time series simulation of the energy sources. Another choice with the HKT is proposed with the HKT-PV-battery system. The procedure is extended to generate the design space of an HKT-PV-battery system. The design space generated can be utilized to choose the appropriate system configuration by optimizing the economic criteria along with location parameters as the constraints. An illustrative example is presented to generate the design space using the energy source data for the site. For the case study, the minimum cost of energy in the case of the HKT-DG-battery system is found to be 11 % less than that of the HKT-PV-battery system. The sensitivity analysis conducted presents the effect of fuel price variation and PV cost on the cost of energy.