Optimal design and energy management of an isolated fully renewable energy system integrating batteries and supercapacitors

•Model for the design and control of an off-grid 100% renewable system is proposed.•Nine alternatives of solar/wind/different storages are modelled and optimized.•Evaluation criteria are cost, emission, and load voltage/frequency constancy.•Solar/wind/lead-acid battery shows the most economic and reliable alternative.•Lead-acid battery/supercapacitor is more efficient than battery only. The continuous rise of global electricity demand and significant dependency on fossil fuel-based centralised power plants are the main indicators of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, thus negatively affecting climate change and human health and increasing the earth temperatures. This alarming situation has demanded the transition to 100 % renewable energy to decarbonise energy use. However, the fluctuating weather resources, and high investment cost are the major challenges with renewable energy implementation. In this context, the combined integration of multiple sources with energy storage in a so-called hybrid renewable energy system was developed as a durable remedy for the previous issues. This paper proposes a joint and conceptual approach for techno-economic design and dynamic rule-based power control of an off-grid solar/wind hybrid renewable energy system integrated with a hybrid energy storage system that comprises a lithium-ion battery, lead-acid battery, and a supercapacitor. Such concurrent integration of 100 % renewable energy systems and hybrid energy storage systems is lacking in the existing literature. First, with the aid of HOMER software, the feasibility and optimisation analysis of nine different configurations was performed in 1 min resolution to find the optimal component sizes. Second, MATLAB/Simulink models were assembled for the winning design based on a dynamic rule-based strategy to investigate and analyse the system’s dynamic response, power equilibrium, DC-bus voltage supervision and load voltage/frequency control against instantaneous and dynamic changes in the load or renewable energy resources. The proposed approach was promoted and validated on an actual case study for isolated residential community electrification in Saudi Arabia, in which a multi-tier framework was adopted to accurately simulate the stochastic energy consumption of the community’s households. From the design results, the hybrid renewable energy system, which integrates solar, wind, lead-acid batteries, and converter with optimal capacities of 55 kW, 18 kW, 325 kWh and