Yaodong Wang, Ferdian Ronilaya, Xiangping Chen, Anthony P. Roskilly
Electrical consumption in a household is not stable but changeable in one day throughout a whole year. The consumption depends on weather, seasons and users. This characteristic of demand makes it difficult to design and build a distributed power generation system to meet the demand for a household. For this reason, a stand-alone distributed power generation system (DPGS) needs to be carefully designed not only to meet the dynamic household electricity demand, but also to be economical. Hence, for a DPGS, it is essential to utilise electrical energy storage (EES) unit to store the excessive energy while power generation is running at off-peak time; and then the EES may supply the stored energy during the peak demand period. This study investigates a distributed power generation system with an electric energy storage unit to meet the dynamic electricity demand in a household. The system composes of one diesel-engine-generator (DG) running with biofuel; a fuel cell; integrated with an energy storage unit including a supercapacitor and a group of batteries. Models have been set up in Dymola software and two different system configurations are proposed and simulated. The characteristics of the integrated DPGS-EES system are presented and discussed. The results show that both configurations are working properly to meet the demand. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Sir Joseph Swan Centre for Energy Research, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, United Kingdom; Electrical Engineering Department, State Polytechnic of Malang, East Java, Indonesia