Economic enhancement and grid‐frequency control of a wind farm‐CAES‐fuel cell‐based hybrid system

Abstract

In the present era, the electrical network faces difficulty owing to the restricted supply of conventional energy resources. Solar and wind power are supremely acceptable renewable energy around the globe due to their cheap availability, zero fuel costs, and environmental safety features. Maintaining power balance in a renewable combined day‐ahead power network becomes challenging owing to the uncertainty of renewable sources, resulting in economic instability. An energy‐storing device is essential for combining renewable sources with existing thermal power plants to control the energy supply and maintain system stability. Any government agency in the deregulated market does not set up energy pricing. The ISO (independent system operator) is the primary organization in the day‐ahead power network that is responsible for collecting energy bids from DISCOs (distribution companies), TRANSCOs (transmission companies), and GENCOs (generation companies). The energy pricing is set by the market regulator at a rate known as Location‐based marginal pricing (LBMP), which provides benefits to GENCOs, and DISCOs as well as the customers. In a deregulated market, the unpredictability of renewable sources affects system profit owing to the creation of instability cost (ISC), induced by mismatching the bidding power production from the renewable plant. To lessen these concerns, the presented approach has proposed an innovative model that employs ideal scheduling of the WF (wind‐farm)‐CAES (compressed‐air‐energy‐storage)‐fuel cell (FC) hybrid systems to enhance system economic profitability while keeping the grid frequency (GF) in the safe zone. The fuel cell acts as the energy‐storing device that can be utilized during high‐demand times on the grid, with the ultimate goal of maximizing profits for the overall system. The CAES system's energy level is separated into four dissimilar points, and this study presents an optimum approach for efficiently using it to maintain grid frequency. The new strategy outperformed the previous methods in all categories. The study was performed using the IEEE 30 bus test system.