Optimal Planning of Renewable Energy Resources and Battery Storage System for an Educational Campus in South Australia

This paper investigates optimal sizing of battery storage system (BSS), wind turbine (WT) and solar photovoltaic (PV) for an educational campus in South Australia (SA). The optimizations are implemented based on real annual load data of Tonsley building (an educational campus at Flinders University, Australia) and meteorological data of the location. The campus has a time-of-use retail pricing scheme and sells the output power of WT and PV to the grid by a flat feed-in-tariff. The system optimization is accomplished in three modes: 1) grid-connected systems without battery storage, 2) grid-connected hybrid systems with battery, and 3) standalone hybrid systems. In total, ten different system configurations are optimized and investigated. Cost of electricity is used as the objective function and sufficient optimization constraints are considered for each system configuration. It is found that the PV-WT-Grid configuration is the most economic system for Tonsley building. Moreover, the system configurations in standalone mode are not economic and also result in high amounts of dumped energy.