Integration of renewable distributed generation with storage and demand side load management in rural islanded microgrid

Abstract

The integration between distributed generations, storage, and load for islanded microgrids located in rural areas of developing countries offer serious challenges. The rural microgrid, catering the energy needs of rural communities, has no access to modern information and communication amenities like internet, communication architectures, and backup power. The lack of information and communication technologies (ICT) and backup power sources in rural microgrid lead to uncontrolled load consumption and inefficient storage dispatch resulting in system-wide outages. This paper proposes a novel approach to overcome challenges such as affordability and accessibility. A proactive load controlling and prioritized smart load curtailment is proposed in real time using local system parameters and human activities. The objective is to reduce blackouts and ensure maximum load supply without using conventional backup sources, computational forecasting, scheduling tools, and sophisticated communication architectures. The fuzzy logic controller is proposed to proactively decide for a percentage of load to be curtailed. Human Activities Tracking System (HATS) for smart load curtailment is used for balanced and efficient integration between the distributed generation, storage, and load. Four system parameters, storage drain time, state of charge (SoC), running load, and solar irradiations, are used as input to the fuzzy controller. HATS controller is used to smartly prioritize the load curtailment based on human occupancy in different buildings. Human activities are monitored using pyroelectric sensors installed at the entrance of different buildings. The performance of the system has been assessed while comparing the proposed methodology, the SoC controlling method (SCM). While using the proposed methodology, the blackout was drastically reduced to 96 to 100%. State of charge depletion rate was considerably less than conventional methods.