Buildings Participation in Resilience Enhancement of Community Microgrids: Synergy Between Microgrid and Building Management Systems

Abstract

Military bases, communities, and university-scale microgrids are being implemented to serve critical loads of high priority. Remote switch scheduling and distributed energy resources (DERs) operation strategies for post-disaster service restoration have been explored in previous literature. Flexible buildings offer the central microgrid management system an opportunity to ensure available energy is directed to the critical loads. This work presents a novel bi-level optimal sequence of operations for managing the controllable devices in small-scale microgrids to serve loads based on a priority scheme in campus-scale microgrids. This study introduces a technique for step-by-step restoration of customers’ granular loads. After and during an outage scenario, the facilities’ internal loads are energized in sequence according to their customer and local criticality levels, as well as the amount of energy available from the bulk system and DERs. The proposed methodology is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and adapts to various operating conditions. The proposed method is validated by performing controller hardware-in-loop (CHIL) case studies on the Banshee microgrid benchmark model on a real-time simulator.