Energy management in a microgrid with distributed energy resources

A smart grid power system with renewable energy resources and distributed energy storage shows significant improvement in the power system's emission reduction, reliability, efficiency, and security. A microgrid is a smart grid in a small scale which can be stand-alone or grid-tied. Multi microgrids form a network with energy management and operational planning through two-way power flow and communication. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of a microgrid, a performance metric is proposed with consideration of the electricity price, emission, and service quality, each of them is given a weighting factor. Thus, the performance metric is flexible according to the consumers' preference. With the weighting factors set in this paper, this performance metric is further applied on microgrids operated as stand-alone, grid-tied, and networked. Each microgrid consists of a solar panel, a hydrogen fuel cell stack, an electrolyzer, a hydrogen storage tank, and a load. For a stand-alone system, the load prediction lowers down the daily electricity consumption about 5.7%, the quantity of H2 stored fluctuates in a wide range, and overall performance indexes increase with the solar panel size. In a grid-tied MG, the load prediction has a significant effect on the daily consumed electricity which drops 25% in 4 days, some day-time loads are shifted to the night time, and the capacity of hydrogen tank is lower than that in a stand-alone MG. In a network with multiple MGs, the control of the power distribution strongly affects the MG's performance. However, the overall performance index instead of any specific index increases with the MG's power generated from renewable energy resources.