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Energy demand of continents, countries, communities and individuals will continue to increase in the phase of increasing population and improvement in the living standards of people. The attempt to meet this ever increasing demand and at the same time protect the environment has resulted in the fast growth of power generation from renewable sources of energy especially from wind through wind power plants and solar through photovoltaic power plants. This growth has been facilitated by various support schemes such as feed-in-tariff scheme, feed-in-premium and quota scheme. Further growth is expected in the future. This is because of the existing support schemes and the expectation of the emergence of improved technologies for harvesting renewable energy.
This development of power generation from renewable sources of energy although positive lead to some distinctive negative effects on the existing electrical network to which they are connected. These negative effects are known and well documented. The fluctuating nature of wind and solar radiation at any given location over a given period of observation is seen to translate into the power they feed into the power network. This fluctuating infeed requires more active management of the network by system operators so as to ensure continuous reliable power generation and delivery. Sometimes the management process lead to non-utilization of power produced by the renewables sources. Secondly, expansion and reinforcement of some existing networks are needed in other to accommodate renewable power generators. These come at a cost. Many studies and researches have been dedicated to finding solutions to these issues.
This work agrees with the use of storage systems as means of solving these issues but the question that remains unanswered is what the optimal way is. There is also a further push given to the view of installing renewable energy plants together with storage systems as a unit in this work. The main task presented in this work, however, is a concept of sizing renewable energy plant and storage systems as a unit. The resulting renewable energy plant-storage unit has the objective of supporting the electrical network to which it will be connected. Firstly the support should be by reducing the fluctuating effect from renewable production. Secondly by helping improve the load hosting capacity of the electrical network. This will be by supplying the part of the load demand leading to the reduction of the overall power drawn by connected loads from the electrical power network.
Historic data of renewable resource and also the load demand at the point or bus of connection are the drivers of this concept. With the earlier mentioned objectives and random or stochastic nature of data involved, particle swarm optimization method is employed in implementing the concept of sizing to arrive at an optimal solution of required sizes of the renewable energy plant-storage system.
The concept of sizing is based on proposing an ideal load demand that can be supplied by a utility under normal operating condition at all time. It follows that any extra demand should be supplied by the optimally sized renewable energy plant-storage unit. In this work sizing results of three scenarios presented. A single node network with three different types of the load was used in testing the effect of optimally sized renewable energy plant-storage system on an electrical network. The outcome of this test showed that the optimally sized renewable energy storage-system improved the ability of the test electrical network to support additional load hence load hosting capacity of test network was improved. The process required modelling and simulation all of which were carried out using MATLAB Simulink software.