Daily cost minimization for an off-grid renewable microhybrid system installed to a residential home

Electricity prices inevitably increase in many countries due to various reasons such as growing demand, incremental costs etc. This obviously has considerable impact on electricity consumers using electrical household appliances in daily life. In Turkey, rise of electricity price is almost around 10% every year and unfortunately this leads to budge from living comfort. Use of renewable energy systems is one alternative to reduce energy cost in family budget. The recent survey has shown that Turkey is rich in renewable energy sources in order to generate low cost electricity in residential homes or similar places using a typical micro-hybrid system with very low power wind turbines, several PV panels, few storage batteries and controllable and uncontrollable electrical loads. The operational cost of this system should be reduced to competitive amount of the grid cost. This is actually a typical global minimization problem with several constraints to be solved. In this investigation, the problem was solved by the SFLA technique and the results indicated that operational cost in a PV/wind micro-hybrid renewable system is considerably reduced.