Optimal day-ahead scheduling for microgrid participation in frequency regulation markets

As microgrid installations are steadily growing in the United States and around the world, widespread adoption of commercial microgrids would rely upon the economic benefit to the owners and operators. With the introduction of new market mechanisms and growing penetration of non-traditional generation assets, there is an increasing need and interest in allowing distributed assets to participate in traditional grid services such as frequency regulation. This paper considers the problem of determining the optimal balance of energy and ancillary services for individual microgrid generation assets to participate in such markets. An optimization framework that maximizes the predicted performance of the microgrid over a day-ahead time horizon while accounting for individual asset constraints is proposed. Simulation results on a realistic test system with practical considerations are presented.