Modeling, Control, and Performance Evaluation of Grid-Tied Hybrid PV/Wind Power Generation System: Case Study of Gabel El-Zeit Region, Egypt

The potential for utilizing clean energy technologies in Egypt is excellent given the abundant solar irradiation and wind resources. This paper provides detailed design, control strategy, and performance evaluation of a grid-connected large-scale PV/wind hybrid power system in Gabel El-Zeit region located along the coast of the Red Sea, Egypt. The proposed hybrid power system consists of 50 MW PV station and 200 MW wind farm and interconnected with the electrical grid through the main Point of Common Coupling (PCC) busbar to enhance the system performance. The hybrid power system is controlled to operate at the unity power factor and also the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) technique is applied to extract the maximum power during the climatic conditions changes. Modeling and simulation of the hybrid power system have been performed using MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. Moreover, the paper presented a comprehensive case study about the realistic monthly variations of solar irradiance and wind speed in the study region to validate the effectiveness of the proposed MPPT techniques and the used control strategy. The simulation results illustrate that the total annual electricity generation from the hybrid power system is 1509.85 GWh/year, where 118.15 GWh/year (7.83 %) generates from the PV station and 1391.7 GWh/year (92.17%) comes from the wind farm. Furthermore, the hybrid power system successfully operates at the unity power factor since the injected reactive power is kept at zero.