Real-time examination of performance enhancement and power regulation in hybrid renewable energy system: a case study

The energy system is often subjected to a sudden change in load and power sources, which leads to high voltage fluctuation, and this variation in the load is reflected in the common coupling point voltage. To mitigate such situations, a hybrid renewable energy system consisting of a photovoltaic generator, fuel cell, and storage device (batteries) with adequate power management strategies is a good solution to mitigate power demand mismatch during the load variation. This paper investigates the techno-economic feasibility of the photovoltaic–fuel cell–battery energy storage-supported hybrid renewable energy system, compared with the existing grid-tied photovoltaic–diesel generator hybrid system. The hybrid renewable energy system's techno-economic performance is attained through the prudent selection of the energy system's working hierarchy. The HOMER analysis software is used to accomplish this. To achieve the desirable working hierarchy of the energy components, a hybrid controller is proposed. This proposed controller is to ensure the power management and load stress mitigation with economic power dispatch of the hybrid renewable energy system. Verifying the viability of the proposed hybrid controller with a hybrid renewable energy system, the control-oriented system is simulated in MATLAB and then implemented in the real-time Hardware-in-Loop OPAL-RT platform. The power management and load stress mitigation of Visvesvaraya Bhawan, commonly known as Hostel-10, the largest hostel of NITK with a residing capacity of 1500 students; is considered a test bed for the project’s viability and to ensure its reliability in the operation of the proposed controller.