Optimal planning of hybrid renewable energy systems using HOMER: A review

World energy consumption is rising due to population growth and increasing industrialization. Traditional energy resources cannot meet these requirements with notice to their challenges, e.g., greenhouse gas emission and high lifecycle costs. Renewable energy resources are the appropriate alternatives for traditional resources to meet the increasing energy consumption, especially in electricity sector. Integration of renewable energy resources with traditional fossil-based resources besides storages creates Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems (HRESs). To access minimum investment and operation costs and also meet the technical and emission constraints, optimal size of HRES׳s equipment should be determined. One of the most powerful tools for this purpose is Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewables (HOMER) software that was developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), United States. This software has widely been used by many researchers around the world. In this paper a review of the state-of-the-art of researches, which use HOMER for optimal planning of HRES, is presented.