Multi-objective optimal power management and sizing of a reliable wind/PV microgrid with hydrogen energy storage using MOPSO

In this paper, a multi-objective algorithm is presented for optimal power management and design of a hybrid Wind/Photovoltaic/ generation system with hydrogen energy storage system including electrolyzer, fuel cell and hydrogen tank to supply power demand in a microgrid system. The generation units are intrinsically non-dispatchable and moreover, the major components of the system i.e. wind turbine generators, photovoltaic arrays and DC/AC converter may be subjected to failure. Also, solar radiation, wind speed and load data are assumed to be entirely deterministic. The goal of this design is to use a novel multi-objective optimization algorithm to minimize the objective functions i.e. annualized cost of the system, loss of load expected and loss of energy expected and provide optimal energy management in the microgrid. The system costs involve investment, replacement and operation and maintenance costs. Prices are all empirical and components are commercially available. The simulation results for different cases reveal the impact of components outage on the reliability and cost of the system. So, they are directly depends on component’s reliabilities, i.e. outages lead to need for a larger and more expensive generation system to supply the load with the acceptable level of reliability. In addition, an approximate method for reliability evaluation of hybrid system is presented which lead to reduce computation time. Simulation results show the effectiveness of proposed multi-objective algorithm to solve optimal sizing problem in contrast with traditional single objective methods.