Impact of Wind Turbine Modeling on a Hybrid Renewable Energy System

This paper investigates the impact of the wind turbine (WT) modeling on a hybrid wind-photovoltaic (PV) system installed in a city in Jordan. A closer look is taken at the parameters affecting the output power to accurately model the system. This helps in monitoring the turbine performance, sizing of the wind farm and the entire hybrid system, which will definitely affect the annual energy extracted (AEE) from a single WT as well as the entire wind turbines (WTs). Also, the cost of the hybrid system such as the net present cost (NPC), the grid operating cost (GOC) and the cost of energy (COE) will be affected. Six WT models are added to Hybrid Optimization Multiple Energy Resources software in order to see the sizing and cost effects of the new system. A step-by-step analysis and design of each proposed WT model and its effects on the hybrid system are presented. Results show that as the WT simplified models change from the cubic, quadratic, toward the linear one, the resulting system has a significant percentage error in the estimation of the cost as well as AEE. Also, the number of WTs increases at the system level till it becomes a wind only configuration in the linear model. But, this is at the penalty of the imprecise sizing solution, which leads to wrong estimates for the project investment. Therefore, the WT has to be modeled accurately by considering many parameters such as the air density, e.g., geographic elevation. The results show that the WT model designed at sea level shows error estimates in both AEE and the system cost from the one designed at actual temperature or elevation above sea level (a.s.l). The simple WT models will not deliver the AEE theoretically calculated. This energy deficit will be substituted by the more expensive on-grid conventional power plant fuel energy. In other words, in order to solve a real problem, the real values for parameters affecting the WT model have to be considered. The same procedure can be applied in other locations around the world.