Optimal scheduling for campus prosumer microgrid considering price based demand response

Abstract

Existing energy systems face problems such as depleting fossil fuels, rising energy prices and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which seriously affect the comfort and affordability of energy for large-sized commercial customers. These problems may be mitigated by the optimal scheduling of distributed generators (DGs) and demand response (DR) policies in the distribution system. The focus of this paper is to propose an energy management system (EMS) strategy for an institutional microgrid (μG) to reduce its operational cost and increase its self-consumption from green DGs. For this purpose, a real-time university campus has been considered that is currently feeding its load from the national grid only. However, under the proposed scenario, it contains building owned solar photovoltaic (PV) panels as non-dispatchable DG and diesel generator as dispatchable DG along with the energy storage system (ESS) to cope up with the intermittency of solar irradiance and high operational cost of grid energy. The resulting linear mathematical problem has been mapped in mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and simulated in MATLAB. Simulations show that the proposed EMS model reduces the cost of grid electricity by 35% and 29% for summer and winter seasons respectively, while per day reductions in GHG emissions are 750.46 kg and 730.68 kg for the respective seasons. The effect of a half-sized PV installation on energy consumption cost and carbon emissions is also observed. Significant economic and environmental benefits as compared to the existing case are enticing to the campus owners to invest in DG and large-scale energy storage installation.