Energy storage off-grid design solution

There is thus a huge global potential, in remote areas, for exploiting local renewable energy sources (RES) in place of fossil generation. Energy storage systems become hence essential for off-grid communities to cope with the issue of RES intermittency, allowing them to rely on locally harvested RES.

When only hydrogen is employed to store the surplus renewable energy, a H 2 storage rated capacity of slightly more than 9500 kWh is required (C4). The hydrogen storage capacity is around three times lower when both batteries and hydrogen are included within the off-grid power system (C8).

When dealing with RES, electrical energy storage (EES) technologies become key system components to make the community energy autonomous. EES devices allow in fact to match load and supply, thus solving the problem of intermittency of locally harvested RES, .

The investigation of different typologies of electrical energy storage solutions becomes hence essential to ensure high level of RES penetration and try to achieve the complete energy independence.

The site is completely off-grid since not connected to neither the Italian grid nor the main Stromboli island microgrid. Currently, the site load is covered exclusively by the usage of diesel generators.

Energy management strategy Energy balance simulations have been carried out over a reference year with 1 h-time step resolution. An energy management strategy (EMS) needs thus to be developed to model the operation of the RES-based system. The detailed logical block diagram of the adopted ruled-based EMS is reported in .