Storage-based Renewable Energy Hubs Sitting and Sizing in the Microgrid

Akbari, Ehsan

doi:10.61882/jgeri.3.2.1

Storage-based Renewable Energy Hubs Sitting and Sizing in the Microgrid

Document Type : Research article

Author

Ehsan Akbari

Department of Electrical Engineering, Mazandaran University of Science and Technology,Babol, Iran

10.61882/jgeri.3.2.1

Abstract

Renewable energy hubs have the potential to significantly improve the technical performance of microgrids while reducing environmental pollutants. This is achieved through efficient energy management within the hubs and determining their optimal capacities and placements in the energy network. This article focuses on the planning and operation of renewable energy hubs integrated with storage systems in microgrids. The objective is to minimize the overall costs related to building resources and storage facilities within these hubs. Key constraints addressed include power flow equations, operational limitations, and the planning-operational model of the hubs. The innovation of this approach lies in combining a comprehensive planning-operation model for renewable energy hubs with the implementation of a bio-waste unit model. The numerical results underscore the effectiveness of this strategy, demonstrating improvements in microgrid performance through efficient hub planning and operation. Specifically, the optimal planning process achieved the lowest construction costs for the hubs, while the optimal operation led to substantial reductions in energy losses and voltage drops within the microgrid by approximately 33.8% and 51.3%, respectively, in comparison with traditional power flow analysis. In this condition for the used case study, the planning cost of EHs is M$46.43.‎

Highlights

❖ Identifying the most optimal locations for deploying EHs within electrical and heating networks,
❖ Determining the ideal sizing (capacity) for renewable sources and both electrical and thermal storage solutions within EHs,
❖ Designing a renewable hub model capable of managing both active and thermal power simultaneously, and
❖ Introducing a combined heat and power (CHP) based BU model for the simultaneous generation of electricity and heat within EHs

Keywords

Allocation and sizing

Bio-waste unit

Microgrid

Optimal planning-operation

Renewable energy hub

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author declare that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The ethical issues, including plagiarism, informed consent, misconduct, data fabrication and/or falsification, double publication and/or submission, redundancy, have been completely observed by the author.

Credit Authorship Contribution Statement

Ehsan Akbari: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Roles/Writing - original draft, Writing-review & editing.

Bibliography

Ehsan Akbari the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Power Engineering from Mazandaran University, Babolsar, Iran, in 2009 and M.S. degree in Electrical Power Engineering from Mazandaran University of Science and Technology, Babol, Iran, in 2014. He received Ph.D. in Electrical Power Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran in 2022. He is now a Assistant Professor at Department of Electrical Engineering, Mazandaran University of Science and Technology, Babol, Iran. He is the author of 25 books and more than 355 papers in reputed journals and conferences and won six patents in his research fields. He has obtained five provincial scientific and technological progress awards. His main areas of research are power quality, flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS), application of power electronics in power systems, power electronics multilevel converters, smart grids, control of grid-connected converters, fault location, distributed generation, energy storage systems, micro-grids, voltage stability, electrical machines, special electrical machinery, HVDC systems, harmonics, reactive power control using hybrid filters and renewable energy systems.

Citation

E. Akbari," Storage-based Renewable Energy Hubs Sitting and Sizing in the Microgrid," Journal of Green Energy Research and Innovation, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1-10, 2026.