Probabilistic Techno-Economic Assessment of Wind-PV-Diesel-Battery Power Supplies for Mobile Telephony Base Stations

Optimal sizing of standalone hybrid renewable power supply for mobile telephony base stations is considered in this paper. This task is very complex due to stochastic nature of input variables such as wind speed, solar irradiance, ambient temperature and electric load. Further concern is modeling of the power consumed by cooling devices which is also uncertain variable dependent both on ambient conditions and power dissipation of telecommunication equipment. The realistic behavior of the station both in electrical and thermal terms can be analyzed only by a comprehensive probabilistic simulator. The basic idea of this paper is to systematically vary the main input parameters (rated powers of wind turbine and photovoltaic system along with battery capacity) and to run a Monte Carlo simulation for each considered variant observing the technical and economic indicators. Based on the minimum annual costs, it is possible to choose the best available investment solution. Simple optimization can be extended to multi-objective by adding some additional goals, such as minimizing the operating time of a diesel backup generator. The optimization method is tested on an illustrative example of a base station located in the Mediterranean area.