Community Microgrid Planning Considering Building Thermal Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper integrates building thermal dynamics into community microgrid planning using a MILP model to optimize DER deployment and reduce costs, considering thermal behavior and demand-side management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MILP-based planning model that incorporates building thermal dynamics, improving microgrid optimization and cost-efficiency.

Findings

The model effectively reduces community microgrid costs.

Incorporating thermal dynamics improves demand-side management.

Numerical results validate the model's effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper, the building thermal dynamic characteristics are introduced in the community microgrid (MG) planning model. The proposed planning model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which seeks to determine the optimal deployment strategy for various distributed energy resources (DER). The objective is to minimize the annualized cost of community MG, including investment cost in DER, operation cost for dispatchable fuel-generators (DFG), energy storage system (ESS) degradation cost, energy purchasing and peak demand charge at PCC, customer discomfort cost due to the room temperature deviation and load curtailment cost. Given the slow thermal dynamic characteristics of buildings, the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in the proposed model is treated as a demand side management (DSM) component, whose dispatch commands are provided by the central MG controller. Numerical results based on a community MG comprising of 20 residential buildings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed planning model and the benefits of introducing the building thermal dynamic model.