Customer‐orientedenergy demand management of grid connected microgrids

Abstract

The consumers' active participation in production and energy consumption in response to market changes is an integral characteristic of the smart grid paradigm. In other words, their role in energy trading, either at the individual capacity or as aggregators, will shape the future of fulfilling energy needs. Despite the foreseen technological advancements, the design and implementation of demand response programs (DRPs) with accurate customer responsiveness have remained essential for network operators. Moreover, with non-dispatchable energy sources' involvement, DRPs play a vital role in shaping the load profile and minimizing the operating costs. It calls for a need to develop a suitable energy management system (EMS) to promote consumers' active participation. With this sense, the incentive-based DRPs are incorporated into the microgrid EMS to investigate their impact on day-ahead scheduling costs and managing consumers load profile. A stochastic-based EMS framework is proposed to this end, and five distinct types of DRPs are implemented on a practical microgrid network, including commercial, industrial, and residential loads. The flexible price elasticity concept is adopted to model the realistic behavior of price responsive loads under different DRPs. Finally, the recently reported novel optimizer is employed to solve the proposed EMS problem and investigate the flexible price model's impact on optimizing the grid-connected microgrid's daily operating costs. The obtained simulation results are compared with the existing state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimizers to test the attributes related to solution efficiency and convergence rate.