Hybrid wind and solar energy converter

Abstract

Renewable energy has always been an entity that the society is looking out for as an alternative for oil. With the alternative energy market expanding rapidly, opportunities rose and engineers have been looking for developments and research for enhancements to utilize this free energy. Among the alternative energy sources, Wind and solar energies have good prospects for both isolated load and grid interconnection. These two energy sources also complement each other. Considering the high cost of electrical energy available from these sources, it is worthwhile to leverage in its capital cost. An integrated Wind and solar converter can be very attractive in such a case. In this report, it will cover a wide range of literature review ranging from current alternative energy trend to the technical concepts of hardware used for the hybrid wind and solar energy converter. The use of DC motor has proved to be an economical improvises to the DC generator. With the correct rpm and magnetic field strength, the DC motor work very well as a wind generator. By having an AC inverter to convert the harnessed DC to AC, it shows the practical usage of such alternative energy converter in our daily life. This project has proved that hybrid wind and solar energy converter is possible and is useful when one of the sources is absence. The building of this hyrid wind and energy converter prototype has been a success, having the ability of self governing the harnessing and dumping of excess energy without any external intervention. It can be concluded that this idea can be widely expanded in near future.