Determining the best scenario for providing electrical, cooling, and hot water consuming of a building with utilizing a novel wind/solar-based hybrid system

Due to the increase in electrical and cooling demands, the use of renewable resources for supplying these demands are subjected to more attention in recent years. This is while in the hot months of the year, due to the weather conditions, the need for electricity and cooling is increased. In this paper, a hybrid solar/wind system is proposed to satisfy the electrical and cooling demands, and hot water consuming of a building. Cooling demand is covered by combining absorption and compression chillers; so that, the primary energy of the compression chiller is supplied by a wind turbine and photovoltaic (PV) panels and the required thermal energy of the absorption chiller is supplied through evacuated tube collectors (ETCs). Considering the space limitation for installing solar systems, the main issue of this paper is focused on allocating the best space share for each of the PV panels and ETCs (in a case study building, 100 m2 of area is considered as a free space for solar systems). Three cases are assumed for the share of installation space as: 75% of area for ETC and 25% for PV (case 1), half share for both (case 2), 25% of area for ETC and 75% for PV (case 3). All of the defined cases are investigated by developing a comprehensive computational code based on energy, exergy, and economic analyses. The results show that although the first case with energy and exergy efficiencies of 50.60% and 18.5% has the best performance, the third case, with the highest net present value (NPV) has a payback period of nearly 7 years, is the eco-feasible case. Finally, by applying 7 different weights for the defined objective functions (energy efficiency, exergy efficiency, and NPV), a multi-objective optimization is applied to select the best system operation depending on the design requirements. Considering equal weight coefficients, the optimization results reports the case 3 as the optimum configuration. •A multi-generation system for providing electricity, cooling and hot water consuming is proposed.•The wind turbine, ETC and PV collectors and absorption and compression chillers are used.•Three defined cases are assumed for the share of collector installation space.•Energy and exergy efficiencies for first case are obtained 50.60% and 18.5%, respectively.•TOPSIS multi-objective optimization method is applied for selecting the best case.