Environmental and cost optimal design of a biomass–Wind–PV electricity generation system

Arnau Gonzalez, Jordi-Roger Riba, Bernat Esteban and Antoni Rius

Renewable Energy, 2018, vol. 126, issue C, 420-430

Abstract: This work describes a methodology to optimize a grid-connected hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) that hybridizes photovoltaic, wind and forest biomass energy sources taking into account cost and environmental impact criteria from a life-cycle perspective. The developed model has been tested in a sample township in central Catalonia. The results show that life-cycle cost and life-cycle environmental impact are contradicting criteria. Low environmental impact layouts highly dependent on RES have higher costs than the ones more reliant on the electricity from the public grid, which present high environmental impact. A sensitivity analysis has been performed to analyze the trade-offs between different energy sources of the system, showing that wind power is the RE source with higher impact on the system since it presents lower cost and lower environmental impact, compared with biomass and photovoltaic power. Another important conclusion that can be drawn from such sensitivity analysis is that improving the rate of return on investment in HRES would be a very beneficial measure to encourage the use of renewable energies for electricity production, as it has significant positive outcomes in terms of both cost and environmental impact reduction.

Keywords: Grid-connected hybrid renewable energy system; Multi-objective optimization; Solar photovoltaic power; Wind power; Biomass (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148118303732
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:126:y:2018:i:c:p:420-430

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2018.03.062

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().