Hybrid renewable energy installation for research and innovation: Case of Casablanca city in Morocco

during the last few years, renewable energy and sustainable development were at the center of interest of many African countries especially Morocco through its Moroccan Agency for solar energy (MASEN). Up to date, the latter has been managing all energy projects including the most important one: ‘The Moroccan project of Solar Energy’. Its main goal is producing a total capacity of 2000 MW of electricity totally issued from solar energy by 2020. In the same perspective, the research laboratory LPRI based at Moroccan School of Engineering Sciences (EMSI - Casablanca) installed in Casablanca a hybrid platform for validating models, testing and monitoring consisting of two wind turbines and two photovoltaic plants. The platform helps not only our students to better understand the energy process (from generation to production), but also researchers to validate their models and energy tests. In the present paper, we describe our installation; we detail its components and explain how it works. It should be noted that this is the first and only hybrid energy platform in Casablanca.