A decentralized strategy to remedy the power deficiency in remote area microgrids

Abstract

Power deficiency management is an important factor in the operation of remote microgrids (MG). Load-shedding is traditionally considered as the main mechanism to manage the network under power deficiency conditions. To minimize load-shedding, islanded neighboring MGs can be connected to each other in remote areas to provide a self-healing capability. For this, extra generation capacity needs to be available in the distributed energy resources (DER) of one of the MGs to supply the extra demand in the other MG. In this way, the total load in the system of interconnected MGs will be shared by all the DERs within those MGs. This paper presents a strategy which aims to interconnect two neighboring microgrids in remote areas to minimize the necessity of load-shedding. This strategy also needs to decide when two interconnected MGs should be isolated. This paper focuses on the self-healing strategy, its criteria and features. The presented algorithm in this paper does not need any data communication system for its operation. The performance of the developed technique is validated by PSCAD/EMTDC simulations.