An Energy Management System for Isolated Microgrids Considering Uncertainty

Abstract

The deployment of Renewable Energy (RE)-based generation has experienced a sustained global growth in the recent decades, driven by many countries' interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuel for electricity generation. This trend is also observed in remote off-grid systems (isolated microgrids), where local communities, in an attempt to reduce fossil fuel dependency and associated economic and environmental costs, and to increase availability of electricity, are favouring the installation of RE-based generation. This practice has posed several challenges to the operation of such systems, due to the intermittent and hard-to-predict nature of RE sources. In particular, this thesis addresses the problem of reliable and economic dispatch of isolated microgrids, also known as the energy management problem, considering the uncertain nature of those RE sources, as well as loads.

Isolated microgrids feature characteristics similar to those of distribution systems, in terms of unbalanced power flows, significant voltage drops and high power losses. For this reason, detailed three-phase mathematical models of the microgrid system and components are presented here, in order to account for the impact of unbalanced system conditions on the optimal operation of the microgrid. Also, simplified three-phase models of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are developed to reduce the level of complexity in small units that have limited impact on the optimal operation of the system, thus reducing the number of equations and variables of the problem. The proposed mathematical models are then used to formulate a novel energy management problem for isolated microgrids, as a deterministic, multi-period, Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem. The multi-period formulation allows for a proper management of energy storage resources and multi-period constraints associated with the commitment decisions of DERs.

In order to obtain solutions of the energy management problem in reasonable computational times for real-time, realistic applications, and to address the uncertainty issues, the proposed MINLP formulation is decomposed into a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem, and a Nonlinear programming (NLP) problem, in the context of a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach. The MILP formulation determines the unit commitment decisions of DERs using a simplified model of the network, whereas the NLP formulation calculates the detailed three-phase dispatch of the units, knowing the commitment status. A feedback signal is generated by the NLP if additional units are required to correct reactive power problems in the microgrid, triggering a new calculation MINLP problem. The proposed decomposition and calculation routines are used to design a new deterministic Energy Management System (EMS) based on the MPC approach to handle uncertainties; hence, the proposed deterministic EMS is able to handle multi-period constraints, and account for the impact of future system conditions in the current operation of the microgrid. In the proposed methodology, uncertainty associated with the load and RE-based generation is indirectly considered in the EMS by continuously updating the optimal dispatch solution (with a given time-step), based on the most updated information available from suitable forecasting systems.

For a more direct modelling of uncertainty in the problem formulation, the MILP part of the energy management problem is re-formulated as a two-stage Stochastic Programming (SP) problem. The proposed novel SP formulation considers that uncertainty can be properly modelled using a finite set of scenarios, which are generated using both a statistical ensembles scenario generation technique and historical data. Using the proposed SP formulation of the MILP problem, the deterministic EMS design is adjusted to produce a novel stochastic EMS.

The proposed EMS design is tested in a large, realistic, medium-voltage isolated microgrid test system. For the deterministic case, the results demonstrate the important connection between the microgrid's imbalance, reactive power requirements and optimal dispatch, justifying the need for detailed three-phase models for EMS applications in isolated microgrids. For the stochastic studies, the results show the advantages of using a stochastic MILP formulation to account for uncertainties associated with RE sources, and optimally accommodate system reserves. The computational times in all simulated cases show the feasibility of applying the proposed techniques to real-time, autonomous dispatch of isolated microgrids with variable RE sources.