Cost Optimization of Renewable Energy Usage in Iran: A Case Study

Inhalt:
In the 21st century, renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydropower arose as an alternative to fossil fuels. In existing scientific literature that dealt with optimizing hybrid energy supplies, few have investigated optimizing costs of green energy based on initial costs. This important part of the optimization problem is addressed in this paper; so the aim of this investigation is to optimize the cost of renewable energy from initial costs in Iran. The optimization problem was put in a linear form with inequality constraints. The investigated Khorasan power grid is located in the eastern part of Iran. It has three different geographical regions including mountains, plains and sea. Three different regions (Ghayen in the mountain region, Disbad in the plain region and Bojnourd on the sea level) were considered for this case study. The results of this study show that the use of a combined renewable energy system instead of a single renewable source is the most cost-effective and reliable way, because there are several challenges in each source that could be covered by each other in hybrid systems. Finally, it could be concluded that the combination of renewable energies is economically feasible and lead to network stability.