Exhaust gas characteristic and cost evaluation of gas engines compensating for power fluctuation of renewable energy

To utilize photovoltaic power generation (PV), the compensation for power fluctuation is necessary since the fluctuation has a bad influence on electric power system. Therefore, micro grid using several kinds of distributed generation is considered to be a good solution. For this reason, studies on batteries have been done in particular, due to the high output responsiveness. However, the power generation cost of batteries is higher than other distributed generation such as gas engines, which have not been studied enough from the viewpoint of distributed generation to compensate for renewable energy. In this paper, the feasibility of gas engines to compensate for the PV fluctuation is investigated from the point of view of exhaust gas NOx and power cost by simulation. As a result, the amount of NOx increases as the output of the gas engine fluctuates, but this increase on NOx hardly has a problem in micro grid. As for power cost, it can be decreased by combining battery and a few kinds of gas engines efficiently. In conclusion, it can be said that gas engines are able to play an important role in micro grid as distributed generation.