Quantification of the Impact of GHG Emissions on Unit Commitment in Microgrids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel unit commitment method for microgrids that explicitly accounts for GHG emissions, enabling better planning and cost reduction while incentivizing cleaner energy use under higher carbon taxes.

Contribution

The paper presents a new UC approach that models GHG emissions and constraints, allowing for ex-ante evaluation of carbon taxes and improved microgrid planning.

Findings

Proposed approach reduces costs compared to classical UC.

Higher carbon taxes disincentivize thermal generation.

Method effectively incorporates GHG considerations into microgrid planning.

Abstract

The global climate change creates a dire need to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from thermal generation resources (TGRs). While microgrids are instrumental in enabling the deeper penetration of renewable resources, the short-term planning of microgrids needs to explicitly assess the full range of impact of GHG emissions. To this end, we propose a novel unit commitment (UC) approach, which enables the representation of GHG emissions from TGRs, the specification of GHG emission constraints, and the ex-ante evaluation of carbon tax payment with all other costs and benefits. We quantify the relative merits of the proposed approach vis-\`a-vis the classical UC approach via representative studies. The results indicate that the proposed UC approach yields lower costs than does the classical UC approach and achieves a greater reduction in costs as carbon tax rate increases. Further, increasing carbon tax rates can markedly disincentivize TGR generation under the proposed approach.