Optimal Operation of PV-Battery-Diesel MicroGrid for Industrial Loads Under Grid Blackouts

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimization strategy for PV-battery-diesel microgrids serving industrial loads with low power factors, effectively reducing costs, PV curtailment, and grid dependency during blackouts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model considering reactive power and an optimization approach for microgrid operation under blackouts, enhancing efficiency and cost savings.

Findings

Significant reduction in energy costs.

Decreased PV curtailment.

Improved microgrid reliability during blackouts.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach to determine the optimal operation strategies for a PV-diesel-battery microgrid covering industrial loads under grid blackouts. A special property of the industrial loads is that they have low power factors. Therefore, the reactive power consumption of the load cannot be neglected. In this study, a novel model of a PV-battery-diesel microgrid is developed considering the active as well reactive power of the microgrid components. Furthermore, an optimization approach is proposed to optimize the active as well reactive power flow in the microgrid for covering the load demand while decreasing the power consumption from the grid, minimizing the diesel generator (DG) operation cost as well as maximizing the consumed power from the PV-array. It has been found that the proposed operation strategy induces a huge reduction of the consumed energy cost and the PV curtailment.