Sustainable, reliable and affordable energy is a part of goal 7 of 2030 sustainable development goals adopted by United Nations General Assembly agenda. Towards this, studies on hybrid energy systems have received much attention in recent years due to their capability of producing less-polluted electricity. Researchers have optimized the economic and environmental impact of these hybrid systems. However, the quantification of human health impact and ecological parameters such as land and water has been ignored. Hence, we propose a multiobjective formulation to optimize the electricity cost and health cost of the grid-connected novel renewables integrated energy system composed of renewable energy sources and a conventional energy source. The proposed system is solved for differently populated regions. Our health cost model accounts the impact of air pollutants such as CO₂, SO₂, NO, PM_2.5and PM₁₀. The trade-off solutions obtained from the multiobjective optimization are presented in a Pareto plot. The energy mix corresponding to the corner and preferred Pareto fronts are reported. Remarkably, the results of the proposed study shows the minimum 50% reduction on health and ecological impacts compared to the base case. Though the data considered in this study is in the Indian context, the optimization formulation and the results are globally applicable. The inferences of this work can enable decision making to policymakers, government sectors and private sectors for installing the developed energy system demographically considering the economic, health and ecological impacts.

Pareto Plot depicting the trade-off solutions for the electricity cost and health cost

Bhavik Bakshi

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