Stand-alone island daily power management using a tidal turbine farm and an ocean compressed air energy storage system

Due to the high predictability and the high energy density, marine tidal resource has become an area of increasing interest with various academic and industrial projects around the world. In fact, several Marine Current Turbine (MCT) farm projects with multi-megawatt capacity are planned to be installed in the coming years. In this paper, a MCT farm is supposed to be the main energy supply for a stand-alone island. To compensate the MCT farm power variation relating to the tidal phenomenon, an Ocean Compressed Air Energy Storage (OCAES) system is considered to achieve the island power management. The novelty in this work is that conventional Diesel Generators (DGs) would only serve as a backup supply while the main island power supply will be fulfilled by the proposed hybrid MCT/OCAES system. A simplified OCAES model is built-up in this paper with cycle efficiency about 60.6%. Simulations under different working conditions are carried out to validate the feasibility of the hybrid power system. The obtained results show that the proposed system power management can greatly help to decrease DG fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emission.