Design of a microgrid energy management system featuring an economic dispatch module and a SCADA interface for real-time data acquisition: phase II

Abstract

This project is confined within the limits of the lab in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), the Clean Energy Research Lab (CERL) located at S2-B7C-05, working on the microgrid. There needs to be a way to control, operate and monitor the microgrid efficiently and conveniently. The control centre of the microgrid requires data acquisition to monitor the status of the system to perform various operations such as state estimation and energy management. When the consumption of electricity increases, the cost will increase. This is because a variety of sources are used and each source’s capability is different, which results in a difference in cost. In addition, due to a recent network upgrade in the lab, the internet protocol (IP) addresses of the devices and assets have been changed and the IP address of WAGO's Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) could not be updated. As a result, they cannot communicate with the other assets and control the circuit breakers. Therefore, the aim of this project is to work on the PLCs, control the circuit breakers, develop Virtual Instruments (VIs) for microgrid asset and to develop an economic dispatch module. This will be done using Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench, in short LabVIEW.

Efforts to update the IP address of the old PLCs were done, including a firmware upgrade. However, after investigations, NTU’s network team only support devices with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Therefore, new PLCs were purchased. In addition, economic dispatch module was coded using Visual Basic and incorporated in LabVIEW. The operators can view the results in the LabVIEW user interface, but the algorithm is written in an external software using Visual Studio. A control module for the capacitor bank was completed and improvisation of the previous work was done. This includes the update of the SCADA interface in LabVIEW and the schematic diagram of the microgrid that was last updated in 2020.