Interconnection of microgrids

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the energy management problem of several interconnected microgrids. EMS of a network of microgrids must determine the power flows inside each microgrid and with the main grid (as in Chap. 4), but also the energy interchange among them. This is an extension of a single microgrid EMS and MPC is an alternative to solve it. The control of these systems presents mainly two problems to be solved by a global controller: first, different microgrids typically are managed by different agents making difficult or even impossible to use a unique controller for the whole system and the second problem is the computational burden due to the dimension of the system when a high number of microgrids are considered. In this situation, Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) is the technique used in this chapter to reduce the complexity. This chapter describes several methods to solve the EMS using MPC in a distributed fashion. Alternatives are tested and compared in a system with three connected microgrids.