Techno-Economic Evaluation of Renewable and Hybrid Microgrid Configurations Using HOMER Pro

This paper presented a comparative techno-economic evaluation of ten renewable and hybrid microgrid configurations for Visakhapatnam, India, using HOMER Pro. The study considered PV, wind, biomass, diesel generation, battery storage, grid interaction, and hydrogen-based energy storage within a common modeling framework. The configurations were evaluated using initial capital cost, annual operating cost, NPC, COE, and renewable fraction. The results demonstrate significant variation in economic performance between the investigated architectures. The reported NPC values range from approximately $1.42 million to $27.06 million, while the reported COE values range from $0.0987/kWh to $1.7700/kWh. The PV-battery-grid configuration produces the lowest reported NPC among the ten configurations, whereas the hydrogen-integrated configuration reports the lowest COE. The analysis further demonstrates that increasing renewable capacity does not necessarily improve economic performance. The high-wind configurations have substantially higher capital and lifecycle costs, despite their increased renewable contribution. Similarly, the diesel-supported systems experience higher operating costs because of conventional-generation expenditure. Grid-connected configurations benefit from the ability to obtain electricity from the utility when local renewable generation is insufficient. The hydrogen-integrated configuration demonstrates the potential of combining renewable generation, battery storage, and hydrogen storage within a single microgrid architecture. Nevertheless, the economic benefit of hydrogen storage depends strongly on the component costs, system sizing, operating strategy, and utilization of the stored hydrogen. Therefore, the hydrogen configuration should be considered as an alternative storage architecture rather than being identified as universally optimal. Overall, the study demonstrates the usefulness of HOMER Pro for systematic comparative assessment of different microgrid architectures. The results indicate that an economically suitable configuration is obtained not simply by maximizing renewable generation but by balancing renewable contribution, capital investment, operating expenditure, storage requirements, grid dependence, and lifecycle cost.

[1]             “Techno-economic analysis of solar, wind and biomass hybrid renewable energy systems in Bhorha village, India,” Energy Reports, 2024. [2]             “Techno-economic and environmental analysis of grid connected hybrid wind/photovoltaic/biomass system for Marmara University Goztepe campus,” International Journal of Green Energy, 2020, doi: 10.1080/15435075.2020.1821691. [3]             “A PV-Biomass off-grid hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) for rural electrification: Design, optimization and techno-economic-environmental analysis,” Journal of Cleaner Production, 2022. [4]             “Optimization and sizing of SPV/Wind hybrid renewable energy system: A techno-economic and social perspective,” Energy, 2021. [5]             HOMER Energy, “Deferrable Load,” HOMER Pro Documentation. “Techno- [6]             Economic Evaluation of Interconnected Nuclear-Renewable Micro Hybrid Energy Systems with Combined Heat and Power,” Energies, 2020. [7]             K. K. Kumar, S. Singh, and S. Kundu, “Modeling and Simulation of Grid-Connected Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems Using HOMER Pro Software,” Indian Journal of Renewable Energy, 2025. [8]             “Prefeasibility techno-economic analysis of hybrid renewable energy system,” Process Integration and Optimization for Sustainability, 2024. [9]             “Techno-economic assessment of hybrid renewable energy system with multi energy storage system using HOMER,” Energy, 2024. [10]          “Techno-economic evaluation of hybrid renewable systems for green hydrogen production and utilization,” Results in Engineering, vol. 30, 2026, Art. no. 111080.