Design of an Optimal Hybrid Energy System for a Captive Power Plant in Pakistan

This paper is about the design and feasibility of a grid-connected hybrid power system for an industrial unit. Due to the increase in greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels, generating electricity from renewable resources is necessary. Solar energy is dependent on solar irradiance, which varies from site to site. A site (Shafi Texcel Limited) is selected, which is situated on Raiwind Manga Road Lahore, Pakistan. The average load demand is 2415 kW, for which a hybrid captive power plant has been designed. The sources of electricity are Grid, CATERPILLER Gas & Diesel GENSET, and the proposed solar system. For this system, optimization analysis has been carried out using HOMER and PVWatt software. Three different grid-connected cases are considered with 0% renewable energy (RE) constraints, 70% RE constraints, and with battery storage. The system parameters are different for each case, and land requisition analysis has been done using PVWatt. The NPC, cost of energy, capital cost, replacement cost for each case has been discussed in detail. The result shows that the proposed system is suitable for a selected site and can provide a significant saving. At the end, final results and possible future work has been discussed.