Abstract
The purpose of microgrids is to improve system flexibility and resilience during normal and emergency conditions. The ceaseless load growth mandates to increase microgrid’s capacity, thereby improving the system flexibility and resilience. However, capacity expansion requires significant investments, making it essential to identify the optimal capacity of energy resources. The methodologies proposed in the literature identifies the microgrid’s capacity with an assumption of investments with a single installment. This way of theoretical approach leads to unrealistic solutions. Besides, microgrid’s participation in a flexible market will enhance its performance both in commercial and technical aspects. Therefore, this paper proposes a realistic framework with the concept “ expansion through time ” inspired by “Real Options Theory.” This framework includes practical parameters like resource & load uncertainty, physical space required to install, revenue generated by resources, and maximum demand penalty, on top of electrical parameters; constrained with significant return in investments to improve the overall savings. In addition, this paper proposes a market participation model for microgrid, which defines a bidding process with two components, such as regular and flexible portions under both normal and extreme conditions. This study considers renewable-based energy resources like solar-photovoltaic plants (SPPs) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) as microgrids’ energy resources. The system chosen for testing the efficacy of the proposed framework is a real-world active-microgrid of Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST), located on an island.
Highlights
In recent years, the renewable penetration into the distribution system is increasing mainly to decrease the reliance on fossil fuels and reduce associated carbon emission
CONTRIBUTIONS AND ORGANIZATION From the literature, it is evident that the existing microgrid planning methodologies mainly focuses on parameters like voltage deviation, loading capacity of the interconnector, uncertainty offered by load, and RERs; leaving the practical constraints such as physical space available for installation of both battery energy storage systems (BESSs) and RERs, investment burden, and the uncertainty of future electric vehicles (EVs)
The optimization problem [11] formulated in this framework includes the practical parameters like initial investments, cost of land required to install BESS and solar-photovoltaic plants (SPPs), yearly expenditure and yearly revenue, uncertainty of
Summary
The renewable penetration into the distribution system is increasing mainly to decrease the reliance on fossil fuels and reduce associated carbon emission. An optimal energy trading methodology is proposed using the day-a-head and real-time energy market to maximize the flexibility of building microgrids with renewables, BESS, and EVs. a study in [29] identifies the optimal capacity of DERs by minimizing a costbased objective function constrained with the placement of DER at less vulnerable nodes (identified via contingency analysis) to improve the microgrid resilience. C. CONTRIBUTIONS AND ORGANIZATION From the literature, it is evident that the existing microgrid planning methodologies mainly focuses on parameters like voltage deviation, loading capacity of the interconnector, uncertainty offered by load, and RERs; leaving the practical constraints such as physical space available for installation of both BESS and RERs, investment burden, and the uncertainty of future EVs. Most of the approaches in the literature apply evolutionary-based optimization algorithms to solve the formulated objective function.
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