Cost-Screening Study for a Cost-Effective Hybrid Power System Using Power Pinch Analysis

The application of renewable energy (RE) for electricity generation is rapidly increasing due to the depletion of the conventional fossil as well as environmental issue. Hybrid Power System (HPS) comprises the combinations of RE that incorporate energy storage that could be the best solution to solve the problems of generating off-grid electricity network especially for rural areas. Power Pinch Analysis (PoPA) has been developed to identify the optimal allocation of power in HPS, thus producing an optimal system. In this research, a PoPA technique called the modified Storage Cascade Table (SCT) has been utilized to identify the actual storage capacity for specific energy storage. Afterwards, the Systematic Hierarchical Approach for Resilient Process Screening (SHARPS) has been adapted in this research to screen four different types of energy storage namely lead-acid battery, superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), supercapacitor and flywheel energy storage (FES) in order to attain the most cost-effective HPS. Results show that SMES gives the best performance on the efficiency and the lowest payback period which lead to the most cost-effective HPS for household applications.