Optimal sizing of a reliability-constrained, stand-alone hybrid renewable energy system using robust satisficing

This paper presents and compares three approaches to deal with the uncertain nature of energy supply and demand in the problem of optimal sizing of a stand-alone, reliability-constrained hybrid renewable energy system. The system is composed of wind turbines, photovoltaic solar panels, a battery bank, and a diesel generator. The proposed approaches are: (a) adaptive robust optimization with unmet demand as the (un)-reliability metric, (b) scenario-based robust satisficing, and (c) stochastic-free robust satisficing. A column-and-constraint generation algorithm is developed to solve the adaptive robust optimization problem. Furthermore, the theoretical connection between the proposed approaches is drawn, and their numerical performances are compared, in terms of optimal solution cost and reliability, through computational experimentation on a realistic case study. Numerical results show that both the computational times and the out-of-sample performances of the optimal solutions obtained from the two proposed robust satisficing approaches outperform that of the adaptive robust optimization approach, providing a strong justification for their application