Novel Demand Side-Management Strategy for Smart Grid Concepts Applications in Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems

The continuous increase in the load demand and the dwindling of fossil fuels makes the need for renewable energy sources (RES) such as wind and photovoltaic energy systems are not avoided. The intermittent nature of RES adds a reliability challenge to its use for loads in remote areas. This challenge can be overcome using more than one source in a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES), an energy storage system (ESS), and smart demand-side management (DSM). In this paper, autonomous HRES is introduced to feed a remote load in Saudi Arabia for minimum cost and the highest reliability. The proposed HRES is having wind and photovoltaic (PV) energy systems in addition to battery energy systems (BESS) and pumped hydro energy storage as an ESS system with a diesel generator as a backup. The proposed system has been designed using real-time pricing (RTP) as a DSM strategy. The proposed RTP with the day-ahead forecasting factor is introduced to work synergetically with the ESS to reduce the cost of energy and maximize the reliability of the proposed system. A modified cuckoo search optimization algorithm is introduced in this paper to reduce the convergence time and improve the accuracy of the size of the components of the HRES. The results shown in this study showed the superiority of using DR with day-ahead in the operation of the proposed HRES.