A decentralized energy management system

Abstract

The primary goal of an energy management system (EMS) in power networks is to balance the supply and demand in a cost efficient manner given its operating horizon, and uncertainties in generation due to renewable generators and in demand. This goal is formulated as the economic dispatch problem. A centralized energy management system faces issues in scalability due to introduction of new generator or storage units and in robustness due to failures in some of the entities in the grid including the EMS itself. To alleviate these complexities a versatile decentralized energy management system (d-EMS) is developed. The d-EMS embeds a decentralized solution to the economic dispatch problem (EDP) based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inside a decentralized implementation of the receding horizon control. The ADMM based algorithm solves the EDP for the scheduling horizon. The receding horizon control allows the system to adapt to changes in the forecasts and network configuration. Decentralized protocols to handle changes to the communication network of devices is provided. These device failure and addition protocols entail network information updates only, thanks to the simple initialization of the ADMM algorithm.