Energy management in multi-microgrid systems — development and assessment

The optimal management of energy generation-/consumption in modern distribution systems has gained attention in the smart grid era. This paper presents optimized and coordinated strategies for performing and assessing energy management in multi-microgrid systems. The energy management process is formulated for multi-microgrid systems that simultaneously incorporate several energy generation/consumption units, including different types of distributed generators (DGs), energy storage units, electric vehicles (EVs) and demand response. Due to the probabilistic nature of some loads (e.g. EVs) and generators (e.g. wind turbine and photovoltaic (PV) modules), a novel probabilistic index is defined to measure the success of energy management scenarios in terms of cost minimization. Moreover, by using the new index, common types of energy controllers, such as DGs, storage units, EVs and demand side management are implemented simultaneously and individually, in a system, and the effect of each addition on the defined index and on operational costs is investigated. Finally, the robustness of the process to the load and generation prediction errors is investigated.