Hierarchical Operation of Flexible Building Microgrids for Distributed Critical Loads Resiliency

Abstract

Community-scale microgrids play an essential role in serving critical loads during emergency conditions, involving the operation of breakers, tie-switches, distributed energy resources (DERs), and loads. Electric loads are primarily considered as lumped loads without many granular levels of controls. Flexible buildings offer the central microgrid management system an opportunity to shed multiple noncritical loads at granular levels by adopting Internet-of- Things (IoT) based controls. This work presents a novel bi-level optimal sequence of operations for managing the controllable devices in microgrids to serve loads, based on a priority scheme in community scale-scale microgrids. The proposed methodology is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and adapts to various operating conditions. The proposed method is validated through case studies that are performed on the Banshee microgrid benchmark model.