Optimal Sizing of a trustworthy Hydrogen- Independent Stand-alone Wind-Fuel cell

A hybrid wind fuel cell generation system is designed to supply power load demand. The aimof this design is minimization of cost of the hybrid system over its 20 years of operation.Optimization problem is subject to reliable supply of the demand. The system consist of fuelcells, some wind units, some electrolyzers, a reformer, an anaerobicreactor and some hydrogen tanks. The system is assumed to be stand-alone and uses thebiomass as an available energy resource. Also, wind speed, and load data are assumed entirelydeterministic. System costs involve investments, replacement, and operation and maintenanceas well as loss of load costs. Prices are all empirical and components are commerciallyavailable. An advanced variation of Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is used to solvethe optimization problem. Results reveal the impact of component outages on the reliabilityand cost of the system, so they are directly dependent on components’ reliabilities, i.e.outages result in need for a larger generating system for supplying the load with theacceptable reliability.

Keywords:

wind turbine , fuel cell , optimal sizing , particle swarm optimization , reliability