Reliability and quality of service of an off-grid wind powered roadside unit in a motorway vehicular environment

Wind-powered base stations and roadside units have been considered as a cost effective greening solution in windy countries which also have limited solar irradiation. The practicality of such a system increases significantly in sparse areas such as countryside and motorways. The deployment of standalone off-grid wind powered roadside units could alleviate the common issues related to grid connected renewable energy farms. Hence, there is need to study the feasibility of an off-grid wind powered roadside unit for seamless connectivity. Unlike the conventional usage of reliability analysis of fault-tolerant systems, in this paper, reliability is redefined in the context of availability of intermittent wind for powering a roadside unit (RSU) in a UK motorway vehicular environment. Transient analysis of energy consumption (energy demand) of the RSU and harnessed wind energy are carried out along with real measurements for developing respective generic energy models. Further, a generalised methodology is developed to determine the minimum battery size for achieving a certain reliability standard and quality of service. Several reliability indices such as loss of load probability (LOLP), loss of load expectation (LOLE), energy index of reliability (EIR), mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to recovery (MTTR), forced outage rate (FOR), etc. are obtained for the RSU. The performance results reveal that with a standard micro-turbine and a reasonably small battery, an RSU achieves a good reliability of 99.9% with significant improvement in the quality of service.