Integrating Fuel Cells, Photovoltaics, and Wind Turbines for Maximum Renewable Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES) integrating photovoltaic arrays (PV), wind turbines (WT), and fuel cells (FC) require coordinated maximum power extraction to maintain stable operation under dynamic environmental and load conditions. Conventional MPPT approaches based on independent source-level control often suffer from adverse source interaction, increased steady-state oscillation, degraded DC-link stability, and reduced total extracted power when multiple renewable sources operate simultaneously. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an integrated perturb-and-observe control framework for coordinated power optimization in photovoltaic-wind-fuel-cell hybrid renewable energy systems connected through a shared DC-link structure. Unlike conventional independent MPPT controllers, the proposed strategy evaluates the aggregate power behavior of the integrated system and performs coordinated duty-cycle adaptation to improve renewable-energy utilization while suppressing source conflicts and dynamic coupling effects. The proposed controller is implemented and validated using a real-time digital simulator under a sequential disturbance profile consisting of an irradiance drop at 0.2 s, wind-speed increase at 0.4 s, hydrogen-pressure fluctuation at 0.6 s, and load variation at 0.8 s. Comparative evaluation against conventional perturb-and-observe, incremental conductance, and fuzzy-logic-based MPPT methods demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves a tracking efficiency of 97.8%, reduces steady-state tracking error to 2.2%, and improves settling time by 42.8% under these dynamic operating conditions. In addition, the proposed controller exhibits lower oscillatory behavior, improved extracted renewable power, and enhanced DC-link stability during simultaneous multi-source disturbances. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides an effective real-time coordination strategy for hydrogen-enabled hybrid renewable energy systems operating under dynamically coupled renewable-source conditions.