Demand response based day-ahead scheduling and battery sizing in microgrid management in rural areas

A considerable number of people living in rural areas, especially in developing countries have no or very limited access to electricity. Usually, connecting such areas to the main grid is economically or technically infeasible and standalone microgrid concept is used as the solution. However, even in such microgrids, the fuel costs are normally much higher compared to the urban areas due to the lack of infrastructure. Nowadays, renewable sources of energy are much cheaper than before and economically viable. If they are used efficiently with the help of storage systems and intelligent management of the consumption, a cheaper and sustainable solution can be achieved. In this study, the authors propose comparatively more realistic models for appliances’ consumption in rural areas as well as new mathematical optimisation problem for optimal management with day-ahead scheduling and planning of rural microgrids. They also propose a new model to capture the inefficiency of the battery in microgrid management and investigate the optimum battery and renewable generation to run microgrid solely on renewable energy. To validate the proposed model and understand the importance of demand response and batteries in operation and capital investment costs of such systems, the authors design and simulate different scenarios and discuss the simulation results.