Abstract
A microgrid (MG) is one of the most efficient ways to cope with the grid-connection of a large number of small-sized distributed energy resources. This paper presents a consensus-based fully distributed economic dispatch (ED) strategy for MGs, with the aim of tackling the difficulties of existing algorithms in modeling network power loss and providing global information. The external power grid to which the MG connects is treated as a special power source called a virtual generator, and participates in the economic dispatch process. Taking the incremental cost of a power generator as the consensus variable, a distributed ED model was formulated based on consensus protocol and a sub-gradient-based optimization method for solving this model has been proposed. The convergence of the distributed ED system was investigated by utilizing matrix spectrum radius analysis theory. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy was verified by carrying out simulation under normal operation of the MG, both with and without the consideration of network power loss. Moreover, simulation results under several scenarios, including exchanged power order variation and distributed generation plug and play, are provided to demonstrate the robustness of the distributed ED strategy.
Highlights
Climate change and environmental concerns stimulate the development of the concept of distributed energy resources (DERs) and their subsequent widespread application in power systems across the world [1]
To completely tackle the difficulty of existing distributed Economic dispatching (ED) algorithms in collecting global information and effectively consider the power exchanging requirement in the dispatch process, we introduced a novel scheme wherein the external grid to which the MG connects is regarded as a special power generation unit called a ‘virtual power generator’
Based on the principle of consensus theory and distributed sub-gradient optimization, this paper proposes a real-time strategy that can fulfill the task of the economic dispatch of MGs in a fully distributed fashion
Summary
Climate change and environmental concerns stimulate the development of the concept of distributed energy resources (DERs) and their subsequent widespread application in power systems across the world [1]. Artificial-intelligence-based approaches such as particle swarm and simulated annealing algorithms have been applied in order to optimally allocate the power of different types of generators and energy storage units [8,9] These approaches are still unable to tackle the difficulties inherent to the solving of the ED problem in a centralized framework. The major innovations of this paper are as follows: (1) We developed a novel leader–follower type distributed ED framework which treats the external power grid as a special power unit called a ‘virtual power generator’, that is ‘dispatched’ by the MG operator This particular design greatly facilitates the synthesis of our distributed information exchange protocol in a unified manner, and the local information of power mismatching and exchanged power instruction can be shared with other power units in accordance with the rule of the consensus protocol.
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