Simulation of Energy Storage solution for Small Scale Renewable Energy Project
Introduction
In the past few decades, the trend in the field of electric production has greatly shifted from fossil fuels or sources of energy to clean energy, green energy, sustainable energy, or renewable energy producing sources. In its simplest description, renewable energy refers to the electric energy produced or generated from regenerating sources such as wind, solar rays, geothermal, biomass, and running water sources. Unlike fossil fuels with limited capacity and with continuous use, the sources do get depleted, sustainable or renewable energy sources are unlimited as they naturally occur. For example, as long as the day and night shall be, the sun will forever shine providing solar rays that are essential for solar energy.
From 2007 to 2017, the use of renewable energy sources to generate electricity increased by approximately 64% globally, with the majority being in small scale and domestic applications such as lighting, domestic appliances, building air, and humidity conditioning, among other applications. The research revealed that the use and application of clean energy sources will increase by 50% in the next ten years due to the intense global campaigns by governments, NGOs, and other environmentally cognizant entities for the desire to switch to cleaner fuels to protect and have a sustainable environment.
For all these years, there has been study and research on how to address the challenge of the reliability of these renewable sources energy. This calls for the development of a reliable and sustainable energy storage system to supplement the required energy for later purposes. For example, the sun might not shine every day or shine with the same intensity daily, therefore there is a need to have a substantive storage system that would facilitate the supply even on the days of bad weather. Therefore effective energy storage systems are required for the accumulation of energy to carry out other useful functions afterward. The benefits of storage energy are that it can be used to power hybrid vehicles, heating purposes, and lighting, and other applications. Right from the age of Edison and Tesla, the inventors of electricity, storage of the generated energy has been a challenge of decades. For a long time, the production of consumption was the option in the field of electricity. However, in the past two decades, renewable energy in specific have registered rapid developments on the energy harnessing systems in all possible sources including wind, biomass, wind, geothermal, etc. Engineers and experts in the last few years have made attempts to devise storage systems through the application of different technologies such as chemical, electrical, mechanical, thermochemical, electrochemical, and thermal forms. The efforts were geared towards cushioning the supply of energy emanating from renewable sources due to unpredictability of wind, solar radiation, rain, waves, etc.
Therefore, I have committed to develop a simulation of energy storage systems for small renewable energy generation systems for small scale users, mainly for domestic applications such as lighting, powering domestic appliances, room conditioning systems among other uses. The simulation of the storage systems to be based on the electricity distribution systems (DS) for the delivery of generated energy from right from its transmission to the load centers through to the community, the end-users. The DS will be incorporated into the system to ensure the safety of the operations and the high quality of the supplied electricity.
Aims and objective of the project
The purpose of considering simulation of renewable storage model is to achieve the following objectives
- To develop a reliable and transient model of PV generators and storage system with electronic converters
- To generate a PV inverter control algorithms and validate the algorithms through simulation
- To develop a real-time simulation model for renewable energy generators (wind, PV, wave) and compare with the conventional synchronous machines.
Scope and Methodology
The simulation of the energy storage systems for renewable energy sources is the most needed technology for the assessment of the feasibility of these renewable energy sources. The main reason why the world has not hit 100% transition and fully embraces renewable energy is on the fact that there is plenty of uncertainty with the supply source as they are resources not controllable by man but rather natural forces. The issue has never been, the capacity or output power wattage, since sun alone emits radiations that if properly harnessed can service the world’s electrical need for centuries. To start, on finding a long-lasting solution to the unreliability challenge associated with renewable systems, simulation of the storage system is essentials.
The project completion shall be on the software simulation on the output wattage storage for small communities that only depend on the domestic application of electricity generated from renewable sources. Storage models shall enable further research and study on the impact of the integration of renewable energy systems into main grid systems. The generation of energy from renewable sources involves hundreds of small generators of between 1 to 5 MW coupled with power electronics to interface with the grid.
The proposed simulation of energy storage systems shall be made accomplish through the application of software and tools. SimulationX, Tweice, and energsoft are the software to be used to achieve the above mentioned objectives together with LabVIEW and MCA analysis tool. After simulation, results, and findings will be discussed in detail to derive a conclusive outcome of the test to affirm the need of having reliable renewable energy storage systems.
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