A cost-effective approach for optimal energy management of a hybrid CCHP microgrid with different hydrogen production considering load growth analysis

An optimum design and energy management of various distributed energy resources is investigated in a hybrid microgrid system with the examination of electrical, heating, and cooling demand. This paper suggested an optimal approach to design and operate a microgrid incorporating with battery energy storage, thermal energy storage, photovoltaic arrays, fuel cell, and boiler with minimization of the total operational cost of the hybrid microgrid. Two different hydrogen production methods are considered to assure the advantage of the developed proposed methodology. Furthermore, besides natural gas, residential and municipal wastes are collected and are utilized to produce electricity in fuel cell units. Load growth for different type of loads is also considered. The new number of households are added to the proposed system in different years and the proposed program is determined the optimum size of each employed resources to add each year for satisfying the total demand. To find out the optimum energy management and the optimum capacity of each employed distributed energy resources, a meta-heuristic Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm is utilized. It is concluded from the results that by utilizing residential waste, the amount of natural gas consumption by fuel cells is reduced about 6.2%, and by utilizing residential plus municipal waste, the reduction is about 26.7%. It is also observed that the amount of CO₂ emission is reduced significantly (46.8%) in the case of utilization of produced heat by fuel cells. Finally, the results confirmed the efficacy of the suggested optimal energy management of the hybrid microgrid.