| Rising fuel prices and a growing concern for the environment have prompted interest in using renewable energy sources to augment fossil fuel fired power generation. However, there are several barriers which prevent renewables from being competitive with conventional energy sources in the current power market; for example, they are highly variable, cannot be dispatched when needed, they have no load following capability, and they pose a problem when attempting to integrate them with the grid network.; Therefore, a hybrid power system has been proposed to address the intermittency issue wherein renewables are supplemented with a controlled power generation source. Central to this design is a controller that ensures a given level of supply by selecting the intermittent source, the controlled source, the storage, or some combination thereof. The system is designed to maximize the use of the intermittent source, thereby addressing the limitations in terms of fuel efficiency and emissions.; With wind as the intermittent source and biomass as the controlled power source, a list of viable options is evaluated for the intermediate storage source. In this research, various methodologies are analyzed for the general operation of the proposed wind/biomass hybrid power system and the feasibility of the same is investigated for Nova Scotia along with the cost economics involved. The proposed system is modeled and simulated in a hybrid optimization software package. |
