Optimal energy management for industrial microgrids with high-penetration renewables

This paper presents a day-ahead optimal energy management strategy for economic operation of industrial microgrids with high-penetration renewables under both isolated and grid-connected operation modes. The approach is based on a regrouping particle swarm optimization (RegPSO) formulated over a day-ahead scheduling horizon with one hour time step, taking into account forecasted renewable energy generations and electrical load demands. Besides satisfying its local energy demands, the microgrid considered in this paper (a real industrial microgrid, “Goldwind Smart Microgrid System” in Beijing, China), participates in energy trading with the main grid; it can either sell power to the main grid or buy from the main grid. Performance objectives include minimization of fuel cost, operation and maintenance costs and energy purchasing expenses from the main grid, and maximization of financial profit from energy selling revenues to the main grid. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of various aspects of the proposed strategy in different scenarios. To validate the performance of the proposed strategy, obtained results are compared to a genetic algorithm (GA) based reference energy management approach and confirmed that the RegPSO based strategy was able to find a global optimal solution in considerably less computation time than the GA based reference approach.