Long Term Scheduling for Optimal Sizing of Renewable Energy Sources for Hospitals

Energy use is on the rise due to population increment and technology development. Generating electricity energy with fossil fuels causes environmental problems; moreover, their cost is high because of their depletion. For solving energy crisis and environmental problems, alternative methods for energy generation should be considered such as Renewable energy sources (RESs) which are considered as a promising alternative for fossil fuels. On the other hand, hospitals are one of the major consumers of energy. Energy costs consist a large amount of hospitals' costs; therefore, hospitals aim to minimize these costs owing to competition among health centers. The objective of this paper is to propose a long term scheduling model for the optimal sizing of the RESs among candidate technologies to meet the hospital's demand while minimizing the costs and maintaining reliability subject to economic and technical constraints. The model is run with real data from a hospital in Iran.