Feasibility study of standalone hybrid power system modeled with photovoltaic modules and ethanol generator for Victoria state, Australia

The electricity generated in Victoria state is majorly with fossil fuels, consequently the resources are diminishing and enormous amount of emission is released in to atmosphere and thereby creating threat to the environment. Furthermore, the electricity supplied through grid to the end users is expensive; this is because various extra charges are added in to feed in tariff, especially carbon taxes. Since with these concerns, alternatively this paper aims to design an off- grid-stand alone hybrid power systems (HPS), to determine the economic and environmental performance majorly with Renewable energy (RE), to supply electricity to Victoria State-Australia. To investigate the RE sources-Solar and Wind, the data is collected from Bureau of Metrology (BOM) and NASA, using the collected data of nine different location in Victoria state, the average availability of solar energy and Wind energy were compared and it was determined that Mildura has abundant solar energy, whereas Warrnambool has abundant wind energy. However, in this study only solar data was used for modeled Photovoltaic (PV) cells while modeling HPS, battery is used for storage purpose to supply extra demand as well as to be able to supply the unpredictable load in future. The study performed in HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable) NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) tool