Optimizing renewable energy integration: a hybrid energy system approach for residential applications

Climate change, soaring inflation and energy shortages are driving interest in Distributed Energy Sources (DES), especially in developing countries like Pakistan, where power outages disrupt daily life. Residential communities are increasingly adopting renewable energy sources (RES) and battery storage systems (BESS) to reduce reliance on utility grid and produce cheap energy compared to grid. The authors propose a hybrid energy system (HES) combining solar PV, a diesel generator, and BESS to reduce levelised cost of energy (LCOE) and emissions while addressing energy outages for a residential building in Lahore, Pakistan. The average daily utilization of selected building is around 463 kWh/day with a peak demand of 33 kW. Different configurations are designed and their techno-economic and environmental analysis is conducted using HOMER Software. In one scenario combining PV-DG-BESS-Grid, the lowest LCOE of $0.0120 was achieved, but it resulted in higher emissions due to DG dependence. A PV-BESS-Grid configuration had a slightly higher LCOE of $0.0124 but significantly lower emissions. Sensitivity analysis also revealed that PV-BESS-Grid system to be most robust among all the designed systems.