Economic Performance Optimization of a PV-BESS Power Generator: A Case Study La Reunion Island

This paper proposes an economic performance optimization strategy for a PV plant coupled with a battery energy storage system. The case study of La Reunion Island, a non-interconnected zone (NIZ) with a high level of renewable energy sources (RES), is considered. This last decade, to reach the ambitious target of electricity autonomy by 2030 set by the local authorities, local and national plans have been launched to promote renewable energy sources integration that led to a noticeable development of photovoltaic (PV) systems. To avoid a decrease of the grid reliability due to a large integration of intermittent energy sources into a non-interconnected grid, the authorities have introduced new regulatory rules for RES producers. The proposed optimization strategy relies on these new regulatory rules and takes into account the energy market data, the amount of PV production subject to penalties for imbalance, the batteries and the PV technological characteristics together with a PV production forecast model. Due to its high convergence rate to the true global minimum and its perfect suitability to practical engineering optimization problems, the recently developed Modified Cuckoo Search algorithm is used as optimization algorithm. The effectiveness and relevance of the proposed strategy are assessed on experimental data collected on a real PV power plant. An economical analysis demonstrates that the proposed optimization strategy is able to fulfill the new regulatory rules requirements while increasing the economic performance of the system.