Improvement of Reliability Indices in a Micro-grid System involving Renewable Generation and Energy Storage
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Date
2017-03-29
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Abstract
Integrating renewable energy sources is important to policy-makers worldwide, especially as the depletion of traditional energy sources and the declining health of the environment continue to be of critical concern. As the installation costs of renewable generation decrease, the incorporation of these sources into the grid is becoming more attractive and feasible. However, in order for renewable generation to be incorporated on a large scale, utilities must be able to guarantee that customers receive adequate and quality power, constituting a reliable system. Thus, ensuring the reliability of a grid system that includes sources of generation with low predictability and high variability, such as wind and solar, is investigated. Energy storage is shown to help eliminate or reduce the load demand that must be met by renewable generation and supply power when renewable generation is unavailable or insufficient, thereby increasing the reliability of the system. With increased research focusing on implementing a smart grid, this study implements a small-scale system called a micro-grid, which has the capability to disconnect from the main grid. This study focuses on a micro-grid in the islanding mode. A mixed integer optimization model of the problem is developed that maximizes the reliability of the micro-grid system by determining the number of critical and non-critical loads that can be satisfied at each time step. The maximization of the number of loads is constrained by the available renewable and stored generation in the system at each specific time step. The generation from wind and solar is estimated using a Weibull and Beta distribution respectively. The software Gurobi with CVX using MATLAB and the IEEE-9 bus system is used to solve the optimization problem and analyze the results. It is shown in this study that the System Average Interruption Frequency Index of the system improves with the incorporation of energy storage into the micro-grid. A specific case study showing the results from this research is demonstrated on a small-scale system in Honduras that includes wind and solar generation. This study shows the potential to improve the feasibility of renewable energy sources in the grid system by using energy storage, thereby lowering emissions in electricity generation.
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Engineering (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)
Keywords
reliability, renewable generation, micro-grid, energy storage