A critical analysis on hybrid renewable energy modeling tools: An emerging opportunity to include social indicators to optimise systems in small communities

Abstract The arrival of different renewable energy and storage technologies with lower costs is helping smaller communities to gain access to affordable electricity resources through energy systems fed from heterogeneous generation resources. With the growing popularity of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems (HRES), a novel kind of end-user software tool has also emerged to help planners optimize such energy installations. At the same time, there is an increase in the number of research articles that warn about the need for considering social indicators such as job creation and social acceptance when designing HRESs in addition to the usual considerations of economical, technical, and environmental criteria. Consequently, the design of HRESs could also be optimized by adding such new social parameters. Mainly, this article presents a complete review of the most popular tools for designing HRESs, and the main conclusion of this survey is that these tools do not consider social factors which is a real opportunity to boost the capabilities of such software packages. Also, this research provides valuable information for the developers of HRES optimization tools, providing them, on the one hand, with insights about the advantages of including social parameters during technology assessment and, on the other hand, with a guide to help them with selecting the most pertinent tool at each case, allowing designers to make the most of the socio-demographic structures and obtain more advantages from local renewable resources.