Sizing of Stand-Alone Solar PV and Storage System With Anaerobic Digestion Biogas Power Plants

This paper presents a deterministic approach for sizing a solar photovoltaic (PV) and energy storage system (ESS) with anaerobic digestion (AD) biogas power plant (BPP) to meet a proportional scaled-down demand of the national load in Kenya, Africa. The aim is to achieve a minimal levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for the system while minimizing the energy imbalance between generation and demand due to AD generator constraint and solar resource. This system also aims to maximize the sizing of PV as to follow the future trend of high penetration of PV. LCOE for the system and a levelized cost of delivery (LCOD) are calculated for the hybrid energy system with the presence of energy storage. Four years of solar data collected from Johannesburg, Africa, are used for system sizing purposes. An in-depth study of the optimization problem has been given and particle swarm optimization with the interior point method is chosen for solar panel sizing. The optimal sizing ratio for the generation sources AD and PV is 2.4:5. The results show that the hybrid system will be cost effective compared to the AD-only system when the discount rate drops below 8% with the current technology costs.