Energy management and sizing of a stand-alone hybrid renewable energy system for community electricity, fresh water, and cooking gas demands of a remote island

Research into the off-grid hybrid energy system to provide reliable electricity to a remote community has extensively been done. However, simultaneous meeting electric, freshwater, and gas demands from the off-grid hybrid energy sources are very scarce in literature. Power- to-X (PtX) is gaining attention in recent days in the energy transition scenarios to generate green hydrogen, the primary product of the process as an energy carrier, which is deemed to replace conventional fuels to reach absolute carbon neutrality. In this study, renewable–based hybrid energy is developed to simultaneously meet the electricity, freshwater, and gas (cooking gas via methanation process) demands for a remote Island in Bangladesh. In this process, an energy management strategy has been developed to use the excess energy to generate both freshwater and the hydrogen, where hydrogen is then converted to natural gas via methanation process. The PV, wind turbine, diesel generator, battery, and fuel cell have been optimized using non-dominating sorting algorithm-II (NSGA-II) to offer reliable, cost-effective solutions of electricity, freshwater, and cooking gas for the end users. Results reported that the PV/WT/DG/Batt configuration has been found the most economic configuration with the lowest COE (0.1724 $/kWh) which is 9 % lower than PV/WT/Batt configuration which has the second lowest COE. The cost of water (COW) and cost of gas (COG) of the PV/WT/DG/Batt system are also the lowest among all the four configurations and have been found 1.185 $/m3 and 3.978 $/m3, respectively.