<p>Off-grid concepts for homes and buildings have been a fast-growing trend worldwide in the last few years because of the rapidly dropping cost of renewable energy systems and their self-sufficient nature. Off-grid homes/buildings can be enabled with various energy generation and storage technologies, however design optimization and integration issues have not been explored sufficiently. This paper proposes a multi-objective particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain an optimal design of integrated distributed energy systems for off-grid homes in various U.S. climate regions. Distributed energy systems consisting of renewable and non-renewable power generation technologies with energy storage are usually employed to enable off-grid homes/buildings and meet required building heating and electricity demands. &nbsp;Building types under investigation are residential homes in this study. Multiple distributed energy resources are considered such as combined heat and power system (CHP), solar photovoltaic (PV), solar thermal collector (STC), wind turbine (WT), as well as battery energy storage (BES) and thermal energy storage (TES). Among those technologies, CHP, PV, and WT are used to generate electricity, which satisfies the building’s electric load including electricity consumed for space heating and cooling. Solar thermal energy and waste heat recovered from CHP are used to meet the building’s thermal load, mainly focus on providing domestic hot water (DHW). Excess electricity and thermal energy can be stored in the BES and TES for later use. The proposed PSO is applied to determine the best combination of DERs and each component’s size to reduce the system cost and carbon dioxide emission for different locations. Results show that the proposed optimization method can be effectively applied to design integrated distributed energy systems for off-grid homes resulting in an optimal design and operation based on a trade-off between the economic and environmental performance.</p>

Optimal Design of Integrated Distributed Energy Systems for Off-Grid Buildings in Different Regions in the United States

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2021/volume/84881

ASME 2021 Energy Sustainability (ES2021)

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