Robust Energy Management for Microgrids With High-Penetration Renewables

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed energy management strategy for microgrids with high renewable energy penetration, optimizing power scheduling to minimize costs while handling renewable energy uncertainty.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stochastic power scheduling approach that incorporates renewable energy and grid trading, solved via dual decomposition for distributed control.

Findings

Effective reduction in microgrid net costs.

Robustness to renewable energy variability.

Successful distributed implementation demonstrated.

Abstract

Due to its reduced communication overhead and robustness to failures, distributed energy management is of paramount importance in smart grids, especially in microgrids, which feature distributed generation (DG) and distributed storage (DS). Distributed economic dispatch for a microgrid with high renewable energy penetration and demand-side management operating in grid-connected mode is considered in this paper. To address the intrinsically stochastic availability of renewable energy sources (RES), a novel power scheduling approach is introduced. The approach involves the actual renewable energy as well as the energy traded with the main grid, so that the supply-demand balance is maintained. The optimal scheduling strategy minimizes the microgrid net cost, which includes DG and DS costs, utility of dispatchable loads, and worst-case transaction cost stemming from the uncertainty in RES. Leveraging the dual decomposition, the optimization problem formulated is solved in a distributed fashion by the local controllers of DG, DS, and dispatchable loads. Numerical results are reported to corroborate the effectiveness of the novel approach.