Design of a cost-effective wind/photovoltaic/hydrogen energy system for supplying a desalination unit by a heuristic approach

The techno-economic assessment, optimization, and sizing of grid independent renewable energy systems affects not only the likelihood of deployment but also their reliability to supply potable water and electricity where needed. Despite many investigations on hybrid renewable energy systems (photovoltaic/wind), the reverse-osmosis desalination unit powered by solar and wind electricity production systems with hydrogen energy storage, and effects of integrating water desalination alongside meeting load demand, is rarely found. In this paper, a hybrid photovoltaic/wind/hydrogen/reverse osmosis desalination system is modeled and designed for increasing the fresh water availability and to meet the load demand to a stand-alone region in Iran. The configuration of the proposed hybrid system is optimally determined with respect to two optimization criteria, the life cycle cost of the economic evaluation and the loss of power supply probability concept for the reliability. For this aim, an efficient metaheuristic technique based on artificial bee swarm optimization is used. From the results it is seen that at a maximum loss of power supply probability set to 0-10% the photovoltaic/hydrogen/reverse osmosis desalination is the most cost-effective energy system and photovoltaic/wind/hydrogen/reverse osmosis desalination and wind/hydrogen/reverse osmosis desalination systems are in the other ranks. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.