Novel standalone hybrid solar/wind/fuel cell power generation system for remote areas.

A novel standalone hybrid solar/wind/fuel cell (FC) power generation system is designed and constructed. The contribution of this work is that the large-scale constructed hybrid system combines two renewable resources (solar and wind energy) with a FC system used as a standby power source to produce electric energy. Moreover, it maximally converts solar and wind energy into electric power because it uses a novel fast and highly accurate unified maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique which concurrently tracks the maximum power points of both photovoltaic (PV) system and wind energy conversion system (WECS) implemented in the hybrid system. Few hybrid solar/wind/FC power sources reported in the literature are simulated models, and moreover, there is not any new MPPT consideration in them. It is experimentally verified that the constructed hybrid system efficiently produces electric energy for a remote area under different environmental conditions such as cloudy sky. The MPPT technique implemented in the standalone hybrid solar/wind/FC system is also compared to the state-of-the-art MPPT methods, the comparison explicitly demonstrates that the technique provides the highest MPPT efficiencies of 99.60% and 99.28% along with the shortest tracking convergence times of 12 ms and 15 ms respectively in PV systems and WECSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]