Optimal design of Photovoltaic, Biomass, Fuel Cell, Hydrogen Tank units and Electrolyzer hybrid system for a remote area in Egypt

In this paper, a new isolated hybrid system is simulated and analyzed to obtain the optimal sizing and meet the electricity demand with cost improvement for servicing a small remote area with a peak load of 420 kW. The major configuration of this hybrid system is Photovoltaic (PV) modules, Biomass gasifier (BG), Electrolyzer units, Hydrogen Tank units (HT), and Fuel Cell (FC) system. A recent optimization algorithm, namely Mayfly Optimization Algorithm (MOA) is utilized to ensure that all load demand is met at the lowest energy cost (EC) and minimize the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the proposed system. The MOA is selected as it collects the main merits of swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms; hence it has good convergence characteristics. To ensure the superiority of the selected MOA, the obtained results are compared with other well-known optimization algorithms, namely Sooty Tern Optimization Algorithm (STOA), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), and Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA). The results reveal that the suggested MOA achieves the best system design, achieving a stable convergence characteristic after 44 iterations. MOA yielded the best EC with 0.2106533 $/kWh, the net present cost (NPC) with 6,170,134 $, the loss of power supply probability (LPSP) with 0.05993%, and GHG with 792.534 t/y.