Economic Aspect of Fuel Cell Power as Distributed Generation

This paper presents an energy management strategy to supply residential load by hybrid fuel cell power plant (FCPP). Economical fuel cell (FC) model includes thermal load, local electrical load, operational cost, startup cost and different tariffs on electricity during the day hour is discussed.  Several Strategies have been presented for supplying residential load (electrical and thermal loads) based on thermal energy recovering and saving. The extended Genetic algorithm (GA) is used to determine optimal operation of FCPP with respect to six-minute time steps in load pattern change. To demonstration proposed algorithm, three different strategies for optimal supplying both electrical and thermal loads are presented with respect to thermal energy recovering and saving.