Fuel Consumption Reduction and Energy Management in Stand-Alone Hybrid Microgrid under Load Uncertainty and Demand Response by Linear Programming

Abstract

A stand-alone microgrid usually contains a set of distributed generation resources, energy storage system and loads that can be used to supply electricity of remote areas. These areas are small in terms of population and industry. Connection of these areas to the national distribution network due to the high costs of constructing transmission lines is not economical. Optimal utilization and economic management of production units and storage devices are important issues in isolated microgrids. During optimum utilization, of renewable energy harvesting is maximized and fuel cost of diesel units reduces as much as possible. In this paper, the optimization problem is designed and solved as Linear Programming (LP). The cost of diesel generator unit depends on its production. Also, the fact is considered that the efficiency of diesel generator units is not constant for all amount of production. As a solution for this challenge demand side management plans have been proposed. On the other hand, load uncertainty is considered in this paper. Several scenarios are simulated by GAMS software for different conditions of a typical microgrid. The simulation results show the success of the proposed method in reducing costs and fossil fuel consumption and increasing the consumption of renewable energy.

Keywords

• microgrid
• distributed generation
• demand side management
• linear programming
• load uncertainty