Design and optimization of Hybrid (Wind/Solar) Systems along China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) Route in Pakistan /

Abstract

Pakistan has become 25th largest economy of the world in year 2017. In order to sustain the ongoing economic development, country needs to keep investing in its infrastructure, education and health developments and energy sector. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by People’s Republic of China has been an important part of economic growth of Pakistan leading it from global competitive ranking of 133 in year 2014 to 115 in year 2017. China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is major part of BRI connecting Kashgar, Western China to deep sea port of Gwadar, Balochistan. CPEC has three major alignments: western, eastern and central. With the 61% investments of CPEC dedicated to development of energy sector, focus is to develop different energy projects along all the three routes. Purpose of this study is to develop optimized models of hybrid energy systems. Current shift from traditional energy production methods to renewable resources is the motivation to explore uncultivated and underrated renewable resource potential of the Pakistan. The real time wind speed and solar irradiation data was obtained from Meteorological High Precision (MHP) stations installed on selected sites. Load data was collected from 100 consumers residing in urban and rural localities for each of the selected alignment. To incorporate the intermittent nature of the wind, wind speed was forecasted before using this data to design the hybrid model. A performance comparison was made between Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for wind forecasting. Wind/solar/Diesel hybrid systems were modeled and optimized using Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) software developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA. Criterion for assessment was kept as lowest net present cost of the system. The results showed that all of the selected sites were technically suitable for installation of hybrid systems. With the decreasing cost of the solar and wind energy technologies, cost can be further reduced making hybrid system financially feasible for all the selected sites.