Hardware-in-the-loop test for real-time economic control of a DC microgrid

Microgrids (MGs) utilising both renewables and energy storage to optimise onsite energy consumption rather than importing power form the utility grid, require a tertiary-level energy management system (EMS). The EMS must monitor and control the energy exchange within the nodes of MG to maximise any solar energy generation and benefit from installed storage. This paper considers a single-family house as the MG that has DC distribution circuit model. The look-ahead EMS is formulated as a linear programming problem, which has been tested in both offline simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment. The simulation results indicate that the proposed look-ahead EMS can effectively reduce the DC MG operation cost without any operational constraint violation. In addition, the proposed look ahead energy optimisation approach has the potential to be used in a large-scale system such as a community MG with multiple buildings.