Development of optimization module for microgrid operations

Abstract

The demand for electrical power has been growing rapidly over the last few years. The development of microgrids has been promoted as a viable solution to meet this escalating demand. A microgrid is an integrated energy system comprising energy storage, price-responsive loads and Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) which may operate in parallel with or independent from the utility grid. The Clean Energy Research Laboratory (CERL) in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has a microgrid testbed to execute the project which aims at designing a power system scheduler to serve as a platform in the development of an integrated energy management system.

In this project, an optimization module is proposed to be developed in the central SCADA server located in the Clean Energy Research Laboratory (CERL) for scheduling microgrid operations, thereby determining the most cost-effective method of distributing the load demand among available generators. The microgrid, for the purpose of this project, consists of a synchronous generator, renewable energy based generator (wind turbine simulator), battery and loads - both critical and non-critical which are demonstrated using the industrial and programmable loads respectively. The aim of this project is to develop an optimization module to achieve minimum possible operating costs for the microgrid. The optimization problem will be subject to various operational constraints The overall formulation turns out to be a mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem which will be solved using commercial solvers such as CPLEX. The final results are demonstrated using MATLAB and LabVIEW software platforms.