The Effect of Economic and Environmental Parameters on the Optimality of Sustainable Hybrid Energy Systems

ABSTRACT The research considers an hourly residential load demand with a daily average of 988 kWh/day and investigates possible standalone systems, including solar panels (photovoltaic [PV]), wind turbines (WTs), diesel generator (DG), biogenerator (BG), and battery bank (Bat), to provide the load demand, for a case study located in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, where the monthly solar radiation and wind speed are 5.74 kWh/m 2 /day and 5.33 m/s, respectively. In this study, enviroeconomic factors, including inflation and discount rates, capacity shortage and load demand, CO 2 and SO 2 penalties, diesel and biomass prices are considered, while they were not considered in the previous studies in Saudi Arabia. The results show that the net present cost and cost of energy of the optimized system are $1.03 M and 0.178 $/kWh, respectively. Additionally, the prices of diesel fuel and biomass have a significant impact on the CO 2 emissions of the system, even with a 10% increase in the renewable fraction. The results of sensitivity analyses show that increasing the CO 2 emission penalty from 20 to 80 $/ton leads to a decrease in CO 2 emissions by 50%. The effect of the initial cost of WT on the configuration of the optimal system is higher than that of PV, and increasing both prices significantly leads to an increase in CO 2 emissions.