Implementation of Minigrid with Hybrid Renewable Energy Sources for Urban Community Buildings

Abstract

The rapid day-by-day growth of urbanization significantly increases the burden on utility grid that leads to frequent grid failures. So, Renewable Energy Sources (RES) based local power supply systems, called microgrids, are evolved to augment the utility grid supply. However, these microgrids possess uncertain power generation capacity due to the dependency on variable and uncertain environmental conditions. Thus, the grid failures continued due to unreliable operation of the microgrids. So, as a solution to enhance the reliability of microgrids, this paper suggests an integration of multiple microgrids in an urban locality, which are built by different RES and form a local integrated grid, called “minigrid”. This is further motivated by the present scenario of urban buildings, where most of the cases, the heterogeneous load natured buildings are grouped together in an urban neighborhood, thereby, facilitating resource sharing. This collective operation of multiple microgrids share the generators across all of their loads, thereby manages the power requirement in the locality itself instead of depending on the utility grid. With this view, this paper discusses the development of urban community minigrid, which is formed by integrating different categories of buildings, where each building is associated with its microgrid. This proposed minigrid scheme enhances the power supply reliability by enabling power-sharing among the buildings; as a consequence, it reduces the burden on utility grid. Further, this minigrid enables power import or export to the utility grid during deficit or excess local power generation conditions.