FV-battery-diesel microgrid design for buildings subject to severe power outages

The need for designing self-sufficient microgrids to lessen the serious consequences due to power lack is obvious. This work proposes a systematic method to select the optimal components of a grid-connected microgrid subject to severe power outages. The microgrid is composed of photovoltaic panels (PV) and energy storage units in addition to the existing diesel generator. This work attempts to maximize the net returns of renewable energy resources (RES) by increasing the percentage of their utilization and penetration as well. In addition, it compromises between the expected running costs — resulted by fuel consumption and energy purchased from the grid — and the investment of adding new components. Besides, it defines a rule-based energy management (EM) strategy which will serve as a kernel of the EM system. Rather than taking the parameters of the system components as the only decision variables, two crucial operational variables are also optimized. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming and solved by genetic algorithms (GA). Furthermore, the net present value (NPV) of the proposed system is investigated over 20 years to assess the economic efficiency. A part of a hospital load in Gaza Strip is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.