Abstract

Diesel generators are the dominant sources of powering off-grid and remote communities, but their operation in variable loading conditions leads to poor efficiency, excessive cycling, high fuel consumption and increased maintenance. Hybridization with battery and hydrogen energy storage systems offers a pathway to improve operational performance. This research works presents a comparative modeling and energy management analysis of diesel-only, diesel-hydrogen, diesel-battery, and diesel-hydrogen-battery hybrid power systems, considering the load profile of a small remote community from the Canadian Arctic. Component level models of the diesel genset, battery, fuel cell, electrolyzer and hydrogen subsystems are developed in Simulink, incorporating conversion efficiencies, operational constraints, and steady state response characteristics. System level performance is evaluated with respect to genset annual fuel consumption, efficiency, uptime distribution, cycling behavior and storage utilization. Results indicate that battery integration plays an important role in improving system performance. The diesel-battery architecture achieves the lowest fuel consumption and reduces cycle count by more than 88% as compared to diesel hybrid configurations. The diesel-hydrogen system alone shows high fuel consumption but excessive cycling behavior. The diesel-hydrogen-battery architecture provides the most balanced performance, achieving around 37.3% of the genset efficiency while reducing the fuel consumption to about 3.76% after hybridization. The study revealed that combining high power battery support with hydrogen storage increases operational stability, reduces mechanical wear and improves energy management for remote hybrid energy systems.