Integrated Reliability-Constrained Design of Vehicle-Induced Wind–Battery Systems for Highway Energy Services

Abstract

Roadside wind-energy harvesting can supply distributed highway loads using ambient wind and vehicle-induced wakes. Its feasibility depends on resource variability, storage adequacy, and service requirements. This study develops an integrated wind–battery framework that quantifies the gap between deterministic feasibility and probabilistic robustness and uses the findings to guide service-specific redesign. Applied to the 395 km Riyadh–Dammam highway, the framework combines airflow and storage modeling, lifecycle-cost assessment, and digital-twin supervisory evaluation. Correlated Latin-hypercube Monte Carlo analysis evaluates 10,000 realizations across 54 uncertain inputs. The results show that nominally feasible designs can fail probabilistic service requirements. For the critical-only configuration, targeted redesign increased the probability of limiting annual unserved critical energy to 1% of demand from 31.99% to 95.83%. The redesigned electric-vehicle (EV) charging configuration achieved a 94.07% probability of supplying at least 90% of requested charging energy. These improvements required additional infrastructure and higher lifecycle costs. Digital-twin simulations supported predictive control for critical-only service and resilience-oriented control for EV-enabled operation. The findings establish probabilistic acceptance and the associated cost of redesign as central design considerations for roadside wind–battery systems. The results remain conditional on the reference-synthetic assumptions and require field calibration and experimental validation before deployment.