A hybrid wind-diesel standalone system for fish farming applications

Abstract

Many Norwegian fish farming facilities are located in remote areas along the Norwegian coastline. For these facilities, grid-connection often involves either very high costs or an unacceptably high grid loss. A consequence of this is that diesel generators currently solely power most of the facilities. In order to reduce CO2 emissions, hence contribute to a more sustainable fish farming industry, it would be desirable to replace as much as possible of the diesel with energy from local renewable sources. A natural solution might be integrating wind power to utilize the excellent wind resources along the coast.

As a starting point, the project provides a clear and perspicuous overview of both the Norwegian fish farming industry and hybrid wind-diesel systems in general – mainly linked to their component technologies. This constitutes the basis for implementing a suitable long-term performance model in MATLAB, which is further used in several simulations. The purpose of the simulations is to give the reader an intuitive feeling on the different components’ impact on system performance.

A wind profile is obtained from long time series between 1994 and 2014, with actual wind data collected at a measuring site close to the proposed location. The consump- tion profile has been made from scratch and consists of one deterministic and one stochastic part, in order to reflect a realistic load pattern. Together, these prognoses have been utilized to analyse system behaviour for each half-hour during one year.

The main results show that the yearly diesel fuel can be reduced from 170 000 litres/year to about 25 000 litres/year, solely by including a wind turbine together with the diesel generators. This implies a reduction in diesel fuel purchase cost of more than 1.5 mil- lion NOK. Including a battery will reduce the diesel fuel further, and thus increase the renewable penetration of the system. However, including a storage element involves a substantial cost. Lastly, it is seen tha the dump load should be able to consume about the same power as the wind turbine rating, in order to utilize the available energy as much as possible.