On optimal electric vehicles penetration in a novel Archipelago microgrids

Islanded Microgrids (IMG) have attracted much attention in the research and development of the smart grid, which is a large-scale distributed cyber-physical system. To overcome the limitations of the single IMG on energy efficiency and economic, In this paper, we first proposed a novel self-sufficient system, namely “Archipelago microgrid (MG)”, which is comprised of multi-microgrids while disconnected with the utility grid. We formalized the EV (electric vehicle) penetration problem as an optimization mixed integer nonlinear programming, which aims to minimize the emission and operation cost in the system. To enable a reasonable deployment of EV in each MGs, we developed two scheduling schemes, namely Unlimited Coordinated Scheme (UCS) and Limited Coordinated Scheme (LCS), respectively. A decentralized algorithm was also developed to solve the optimization model in LCS. A simulation study based on an modified IEEE-9 bus system with three MGs show that our proposed schemes can reduce both the environmental pollution created by CO2 emission and operation cost. Especially, with the consideration of peak load limits and resident preferences, the LCS scheme can obtain better results than the UCS scheme, leading to the reduction of the environmental pollution by 15.2% raised by CO2 emission, as well as the total cost by 10.8% in the system.