An-Najah Staff

 Hybrid power systems are based on renewable energysources and especially on photovoltaic and wind energy systems.Software package is used to analyze measuring data for windspeed and solar radiation of two locations in Palestine(Ramallah and Nablus). Results of analysis illustrate thatenergy density available in wind for Ramallah site is about 2008  kWh/ mP2.year, while it is 927 kWh/m2 .year for Nablus site. Thedaily average of solar radiation intensity on horizontal surfaceis about 5.4 kWh/m2 .day. A Matlab software package is used to  simulate different scenarios of operation of the hybrid  system by making energy balance calculations on an hourly basis foreach of the 8760 hours in a year. This enable  to  choose the appropriate sizes of the different components for the most optimum  scenario. The optimization is based on cost of generation. Results of the simulation illustrate that the most economic scenario is the scenario that uses a hybrid systemmainly dependent on wind. Cost of energy (COE) in thisscenario is 1.28 NIS/kWh(͠   0.35 $/kWh). Other scenariosdependent on wind-diesel hybrid system, PV-diesel  hybrid system, wind stand-alone system, PV stand-alone system, or diesel only, give results of COE greater than this value. It wasconcluded that none of the hybrid system scenarios analyzedcould be justified to replace  purchasing of electricity from thegrid where the COE is 0.70 NIS/kWh(0.19 $/kWh).