PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND SCENARIO-BASED EVALUATION OF HYBRID-WIND-BATTERY-SOLAR ENERGY SYSTEMS

Abstract

The integration of renewable energy systems into institutional campuses presents a complex design challenge requiring simultaneous consideration of technical performance, economic feasibility, and seasonal resource variability. While hybrid wind–solar systems have been widely proposed as a solution to the limitations of standalone renewable configurations, comparative assessments conducted under consistent site-specific conditions remain limited, particularly for institutional-scale applications in the Southern Plains region of the United States. This thesis develops and applies an energy-balance simulation framework in MATLAB to evaluate three renewable energy system configurations; solar-only, wind-only, and hybrid wind–solar with battery storage at the University of Oklahoma (OU) campus scale. The framework integrates five years of high-resolution meteorological data from the Oklahoma Mesonet with historical campus electricity consumption records, and incorporates hub-height wind speed correction, scale factor analysis, hourly battery energy storage simulation, and techno-economic evaluation using levelized cost of energy.At scale factor 2, the hybrid system achieves 71.2% average renewable penetration compared to 41.4% for solar-only and 29.9% for wind-only, while maintaining a minimum monthly penetration of 27.8% versus 2.2% for the wind-only scenario. The wind-only configuration exhibits repeated near-zero generation events during summer months due to atmospheric suppression of low-level wind speeds across the Southern Plains, confirming its unsuitability as a primary institutional energy source in this region. The solar-only configuration achieves the lowest levelized cost of energy at $0.057/kWh, while the hybrid system reaches $0.089/kWh; approximately cost-neutral relative to current Oklahoma commercial electricity rates, while delivering substantially higher penetration and resource diversity. Battery sensitivity analysis across 2-to-8-hour storage durations demonstrates diminishing returns with increasing capacity, with the 2-hour configuration offering the most favorable cost-performance ratio at current benchmark costs. A key methodological finding is that hourly battery simulation reveals a 19.1% grid import reduction for the base case 4-hour storage configuration, nearly twenty times larger than monthly simulation would predict, establishing hourly temporal resolution as a minimum standard for storage performance assessment in this class of system. The results support hybrid wind–solar deployment as the technically and economically preferred configuration for institutional renewable energy integration in the Southern Plains, and the analytical framework developed here provides a replicable foundation for site-specific renewable energy planning at other campuses in the region.