Background

Energy systems are playing a major role in day today life. It may be your refrigerator, air conditioner, power generator that you use to get electricity etc. that we discuss. It is prudent that though we use power and energy very few of us are concerned on energy conservation. Even though we always try to match it with financial aspects of it I feel that there is something more on it especially when consider about the social responsibility. Fossil fuel resources are depleting at a rapid speed and at the same time, we are facing lot of problems created by emission of fossil fuel combustion. Therefore, we are in period that special attention should be given to conservation of energy.

Optimal designs of Energy systems become vital in such circumstances, which is always a challenging process where number of technoeconomical and environmental aspects need to be considered. Most of the times modeling related with such energy systems is a difficult task. Meanwhile number of design parameters is to be considered. This makes the optimization work hard and it is essential to move away from classical methods.

In this blog, I am sharing the research work we carried out by our group on optimization of such energy systems. Mainly we are focusing on optimization of multiple boiler systems, hybrid energy systems, and waste to energy pathways. I am really please to hear your comments and it would be a great support to improve the quality of our work.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Moving from stand-alone to grid connected


With time, most of the stand-alone systems need to be adjusted to increasing load demand and grid integration. The time taken for this will depend on the development of the energy infrastructure (especially in rural electrification projects), expansion of the main grid etc. Selecting optimum system configuration considering a later expansion or grid integration is a difficult task where more research work needs to be focused on.
At present, mainly there are two types of grid connected energy systems.
Category 1: Main intention of the grid connected energy system is to supply the local demand and additional energy produced will be sent to the existing main grid.
Category 2: Main intention of the grid connected energy system is power generation for the grid and small fraction of it is taken for the local demand.



Fig.2 Grid connected energy system at Ambewela, Sri Lanka

It is prudent that existing methods cannot be used with advanced technologies such as smart metering where factors such as hourly Cost Of Energy (COE), hourly variation of the local demand, selling price of energy unit etc needs to be considered when selecting the operation strategy. Further, this delineate the importance of energy storage mechanism which can be used to store energy either the energy production is high or the COE of the grid is low so that it can be used later when the COE of the grid is high.

Bibliography:   
[1] D. P. Kaundinya, P. Balachandra, and N. Ravindranath, “Grid-connected versus stand-alone energy systems for decentralized power—A review of literature,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, vol. 13, pp. 2041-2050, Apr. 2010.
[2] J. L. Bernal-Agustin and R. Dufo-Lopez, “Hourly energy management for grid-connected wind-hydrogen systems,” International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol. 33, no. 22, pp. 6401-6413, Nov. 2008.
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