Data-Driven Dynamical Control for Bottom-up Energy Internet System

Abstract

With the increasing concern on climate change and global warming, the reduction of carbon emission becomes an important topic in many aspects of human society. The development of energy Internet (EI) makes it possible to achieve better utilization of distributed renewable energy sources with the power sharing functionality introduced by energy routers (ERs). In this paper, a bottom-up EI architecture is designed, and a novel data-driven dynamical control strategy is proposed. Intelligent controllers augmented by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques are adopted for the operation of each microgrid independently in the bottom layer. Moreover, the concept of curriculum learning (CL) is integrated into DRL to improve the sample efficiency and accelerate the training process. Based on the power exchange plan determined in the bottom layer, considering the stochastic nature of electricity price in the future power market, the optimal power dispatching scheme in the upper layer is decided via model predictive control. The simulation has shown that, under the bottom-up architecture, compared with the conventional methods such as proportional integral and optimal power flow, the proposed method reduces overall generation cost by 7.1% and 37%, respectively. Meanwhile, the introduced CL-based training strategy can significantly speed up the convergence during the training of DRL. Last but not least, our method increases the profit of energy trading between ERs and the main grid.