Optimal Sizing of a Stand Alone Hybrid Power System Based on Battery/Hydrogen with an Improved Ant Colony Optimization
A distributed power system with renewable energy sources is very popular in recent years due to the rapid depletion of conventional sources of energy. Reasonable sizing for such power systems could improve the power supply reliability and reduce the annual system cost. The goal of this work is to optimize the size of a stand alone hybrid photovoltaic (PV)/wind turbine (WT)/battery (B)/hydrogen system (a hybrid system based on battery and hydrogen (HS BH) for reliable and economic supply. Two objectives that take the minimum annual system cost and maximum system reliability described as the loss of power supply probability (LPSP) have been addressed for sizing HS BH from a more comprehensive perspective, considering the basic demand of load, the profit from hydrogen, which is produced by HS BH, and an effective energy storage strategy. An improved ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm has been presented to solve the sizing problem of HS BH. Finally, a simulation experiment has been done to demonstrate the developed results, in which some comparisons have been done to emphasize the advantage of HS BH with the aid of data from an island of Zhejiang, China.