A novel metaheuristic approach to scale the economic impact of grid participation on a microgrid system

Abstract

Microgrids are having more importance in the power system network, favouring the use of renewable energy sources (RES), thus, reducing the emission of the toxic gases. Grid-connected mode of microgrid operations is emphasized due to its economic and technical advantages, resulting in diminished generation cost of the system. Six scenarios of grid participation are studied in this paper, with the generation cost of the microgrid system being minimized in each scenario. These scenarios are modelled in a way such that they exhibit various paradigms of connections and disconnections between the grid and microgrid system. A novel hybrid of whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and sine–cosine algorithm (SCA) is proposed as the optimization tool to minimize the generation cost for all the scenarios. Costs obtained by the approach are analyzed with the costs given by differential evolution, whale optimization and sine–cosine algorithms. The generation cost surged approximately 4%, 7% and 11% when the grid is disconnected from the microgrid system for 8, 10 and 12 h respectively. The generation cost, during passive participation of the grid, is as high as 7.5% more than the ideal case. Numerical results and non-parametric statistical analysis such as Friedman and Quade tests, validate the results obtained by the novel hybrid approach.