Reliability of high renewable penetration microgrid facilitated by coordination of air conditioning system and cooling fans

Abstract

Demand side management is well known as an effective way to reduce the power mismatch between stochastic supply and demand in a microgrid. Since thermal comfort of occupants is mainly determined by air temperature and speed, we explore the fact that building demand flexibility could be enhanced by coordination of air conditioning and mechanical ventilation (ACMV) system and cooling fans. The coordinated scheduling of these energy devices is addressed in this paper to minimize the power mismatch between the supply and demand in a high renewable penetration microgrid. A receding horizon-based framework is developed to address the uncertainties in both the supply and demand. Based on this framework, we have to solve the problem at each sampling stage with the future evolution of the system dynamics. Due to the coupling between ACMVs and fans and a large number of these devices in the microgrid, the problem may not be tractable. So we develop a Lagrangian relaxation-based algorithm to efficiently solve the problem at each stage. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed method based on the actual data.