Integration of renewable energy to power public transport at the Island of Pantelleria

The following paper deals with the use of renewable energy to supply a system of electric bus in Pantelleria. The renewables considered in the work are wave, wind and photovoltaic. The wave power is harvested through the ISWEC (Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter) device, a floating slack moored gyroscopic system already deployed in Pantelleria in 2015. A detailed model of the ISWEC is provided and used to derive the hourly resolute power fed to the grid knowing the sea state. PV and wind turbine modeling are also included and together with the wave model provide input to the electric bus model. The electric bus model is composed of a main storage, representing the bus recharging station, and the model of the onboard storage in buses. A first design of the integrated renewables-storage-buses is performed to identify the design starting point. Then a minimization algorithm provides the correct sizing of the renewable energy mix and a sensitivity analysis with respect to the storages capacities provides the trade-offs on the percentage of renewable energy exploitable by the system.