Power Loss and Total Load Demand Coverage in Stand-Alone Microgrids: A Combined and Conventional Droop Control Perspectives

Abstract

Conventional droop control plays an essential role in microgrids with distributed generators, DGs, and variable load demand. Despite its advantages, the conventional droop scheme does not take into account the minimization of power losses and the maximization of the total load coverage. Moreover, most of the nonconventional droop control studies that address power loss consider one variable load. This study proposes a combined droop scheme and inspects its effects on power loss minimization and total load coverage. The proposed scheme combines conventional and nonconventional droop schemes and constructs a 3D P-f droop characteristic that takes into account the presence of two variable loads. Four and six-bus microgrids are adopted to simulate and illustrate the system behavior in MatLab. Results are compared to the standard fully conventional droop approach; results showed that the combined scheme has higher performance in terms of power loss gain and total load coverage.