Control Strategy of the Pumped Storage Unit to Deal with the Fluctuation of Wind and Photovoltaic Power in Microgrid

Abstract

With the development and utilization of distributed energy and microgrid, distributed energy storage has become a new development trend. However, small pumped storage units have the advantages of flexible engineering location, low investment, quick effect, low requirements on transmission lines, and a better solution to the peak load demand of the system. Therefore, it is more and more used in the microgrid, and it conducts joint dispatching with wind power, photovoltaic, and other clean energies. To solve the capacity problem of small pumped storage units within the microgrid, a new control strategy is proposed in this paper. Two pumped storage units are used for joint operations. Taking the smoothed combined output power of wind power, photovoltaic power, and pumped storage power as the target, and considering the limitations of transmission lines, the constraints of wind power and photovoltaic power fields as well as the restrictions of pumped storage power units and corresponding reservoirs are taken into account. In this paper, social particle swarm optimization (SPSO) with improved weight is used to calculate and solve the model. The effectiveness of the new control strategy is verified.

Keywords

• renewable energies
• microgrid dispatch
• pumped storage unit
• control strategy
• particle swarm optimization