Carbon constrained economic dispatch of a microgrid system based on different grid pricing strategies considering uncertainty

Microgrids can be considered a reduced power system network wherein the generation, transmission, and distribution of power occurs within a limited geographical area. They are employed to use the maximum penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). Microgrid also has advantages like reduction of transmission losses and costs pertaining to such losses. The objectives of economic dispatch, emission dispatch, penalty‐factor (PPF) based combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) and environmental constrained economic dispatch (ECED) are evaluated in this paper. A low‐voltage microgrid system for three different scenarios is studied. A novel, robust and powerful hybrid swarm‐intelligence optimization algorithm is used, which is based on amalgamating the features of conventional gray‐wolf optimizer, sine‐cosine and crow search algorithm. Due to the use of RES, the active power production cost and carbon emission of the microgrid system were reduced to approximately 3% for all the objectives. More than 15% reductions in generation costs were obtained throughout the study when the time‐of‐usage electricity market pricing strategy was used instead of the fixed pricing strategy. Also, results show that the ECED methods of economic emission dispatch provided better‐compromised solutions than the PPF‐based CEED method. Finally, non‐parametric statistical analysis is used to analyze and validate the quality of the projected novel technique, which is measured against the outcomes found with algorithms used in the state‐of‐art literature.