Energy management of a renewable-based isolated micro-grid by optimal utilization of dump loads and plug-in electric vehicles

Abstract This paper proposes a new day-ahead energy management system (EMS) for an off-grid fishing island micro-grid (MG). The MG considered in this work is well equipped with smart grid infrastructure and embedded with plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). Moreover, it is a green and fossil fuel free MG without any conventional power plant. The MG provides its load demand by solely renewable generations, including wind farms (WF) and photovoltaic (PV) power plants. Therefore, keeping balance between generation and demand is a difficult task in day-ahead operation planning of this MG. In order to overcome this obstacle, the MG uses a mega-scale battery energy storage system (BESS). However, the capacity of the BESS is limited and it is not economically feasible to increase the BESS capacity. Therefore, the MG considers PEVs G2V/V2G operation modes planning and dump loads optimal utilization as supplementary balance options. The main dump loads in this MG are industrial fish refrigerators (IFRs) and reverse osmosis desalination system (RODS). These dump loads in addition to PEVs’ G2V/V2G modes of operation are scheduled in the EMS proposed in this paper. Numerical studies show that the proposed EMS reduces total daily wasted energy and energy not served by 96% and 30% respectively.