Optimal Sizing of a Reliable Hydrogen-based Stand-alone Wind-Fuel Cell System

A hybrid wind/ fuel cell generation system is designed to supply power demand. The aim of this design is to minimize the total cost of the hybrid system over an expected 20 years of operation. The optimization problem is solved aimed at providing a reliable supply for the consumer’s demand. The system consists of fuel cells, some wind units, some electrolyzers, a reformer, an anaerobic reactor and some hydrogen tanks. The system is assumed stand-alone and uses the biomass as an available energy source. Also, wind speed and load data are assumed completely deterministic. System costs are mainly due to the investments, replacement, operation and maintenance as well as loss of load costs. The prices are provided empirically, and the system components are commercially available. An advanced upgrade of Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. Results are analyzed to illustrate the impact of component outages on the reliability and the system costs, so it is shown that they are directly dependent on each component’s reliability (e.g. the outages result in a need for a generating system bigger in size to provide the load with an acceptable reliability of supply.