Search

Summary: The present paper describes a new optimal design for an autonomous renewable energy‐based CHP system for a remote area in Zhidoi county, China. The configuration contains different parts of the electric heater (EH), photovoltaic‐thermal (PV/T), wind turbines (WTs), thermal energy storage (TES), and electrical energy storage (EES). The total annual cost (TAC) is utilized as a cost function of the system configuration and the idea is to minimize this function to access an optimal configuration. Due to the complicated nonlinear nature of this system, a metaheuristic‐based method, called Improved Marine Predators Algorithm (IMPA) has been introduced and designed. The reason for using this new algorithm is to cover the main drawbacks of most metaheuristics like better accuracy and higher convergence speed. To show the capability of the designed IMPA, it is validated by some different new metaheuristics from the literature. Afterward, the algorithm is used for system configuration optimization. Some sensitivity analysis is also investigated to shoe the method capability and the final results confirm the high ability of the proposed method for providing an optimal renewable energy‐based CHP system. The final results show a $56 307.74 value of TAC. The total efficiency of the system for the winter and the summers are 66% and 61%, respectively and the minimum total annual cost happens at AD = 0.8983. Finally, the minimum value of the total annual cost is achieved by the proposed method with 922.4 kWh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]