Optimal power generation and consumption management using photovoltaic and fuel-cell in China

This study presents a techno-economic analysis of an off-grid hybrid photovoltaic (PV) and fuel cell (FC) system. The research is to supply the power of off-grid regions in urban areas in China. The main idea is to minimise the Total Annual Cost (TAC) to estimate the optimal number of equipment. The minimisation is performed based on a newly designed Sunflower Optimization algorithm based on chaos conception (cSFO) to get more efficient results in achieving the minimum possible TAC. The main part of the improvement in this research is to consider the Loss of Power Supply Possibility. By applying the presented approach, the optimal number for PVs, FCs, and hydrogen storage tanks are obtained 32, 35, and 60, respectively. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to indicate the effect of the equipment reliability on the primary costs on the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE).