A Siting and Sizing Optimization Approach for PV-Battery-Diesel Hybrid Systems

This paper proposes a new method to determine the sizing and siting of diesel generators (DGs), photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, and batteries for off-grid systems. In this work, the objective is to reduce the total system cost while fulfilling the load demand and maintaining the power quality of the system, among other constraints. This is achieved by employing a two-stage particle swarm optimization algorithm; the first for siting and sizing of the system and the second for its scheduling. Three case studies, namely only DGs, DGs + PV, and DGs + PV + batteries systems, based on the energy requirement of an Indonesian island are presented. In addition, real solar irradiance and temperature data are utilized together with a measured load profile. The results reveal that a system that relies only on DGs is not able to keep the system voltage within the tolerable range (from 0.95 to 1.05 p.u.), while yielding a lifetime cost of 104 million USD. The DGs + PV system requires a lower lifetime cost, 67 million USD. Nevertheless, the voltage of the system reaches values lower than 0.95 p.u. for certain nodes during night-time as the PV are not able to provide power. Finally, the DGs + PV + batteries system yields the lowest cost, 64 million USD, and is able to keep the values of the voltage within the desired range, as batteries can provide power when PV are not operating.