We study the economic viability and optimal sizing and siting of a hybrid plant that combines a ringwall hydro storage system with wind and solar power plants (ringwall storage hybrid power plant, RSHPP). A real options model is introduced to analyze the economics of an onshore RSHPP, and in particular of the varying storage volume in light of the stochastic character of wind and solar power, a...

The recent sharp drop in the cost of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation accompanied by globally rapidly increasing investment in PV plants calls for new planning and management tools for large-scale distributed solar networks. Of major importance are methods to overcome intermittency of solar electricity, i.e., to provide dispatchable electricity at minimal costs. We find that pairs of el...

Distributed generation (DG) sources are becoming more prominent in distribution systems due to the incremental demands for electrical energy. Locations and capacities of DG sources have great impacts on the system losses in a distribution network. This paper presents a study aimed for optimally determining the size and location of distributed generation units in distribution systems with differ...

Microgrids (MGs) contain a diverse mix of energy resources to provide safe and secure power to the consumers. Batteries are utilized in MGs for further energy security assurance as well as cost minimization. In this paper, an efficient approach is introduced for simultaneous energy management and optimal battery sizing to accomplish economic MG operation. Also, demand response programs are empl...

In this paper, a combination of simulated annealing (SA) and intelligent water drops (IWD) algorithm is used to solve the nonlinear/complex problem of simultaneous reconfiguration with optimal allocation (size and location) of wind turbine (WT) as a distributed generation (DG) and dynamic voltage restorer (DVR) as a distributed flexible AC transmission systems (DFACT) unit in a distribution sys...

Widespread application of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) as an important part of smart grids requires drivers and power grid constraints to be satisfied simultaneously. We address these two challenges with the presence of renewable energy and charging rate optimization in the current paper. First optimal sizing and siting for installation of a distributed generation (DG) system is per...

This paper demonstrates a toolkit for multiple observer siting to maximize their joint viewshed, on high-resolution gridded terrains, up to 2402 × 2402, with the viewsheds’ radii of up to 1000. It shows that approximate (rather than exact) visibility indexes of observers are sufficient for siting multiple observers. It also shows that, when selecting potential observers, geographic dispersion i...