User and Microgrid Energy Optimization in Cooperative MGs

The envisaged future generation power or smart grid (SG) will incorporate ICT technologies as well as innovative ideas for advanced integrated and automated power systems. The bidirectional information and energy flows within the envisaged advanced SG together with other aiding devices and objects, promote a new vision to energy supply and demand response. Meanwhile, the gradual shift to the next generation fully fledged SGswill be preceded by individualisolated microgrids voluntarily collaborating in the managing of allthe available energy resources within theircontrol to optimally serve both demand and distribution. In so doing, innovative applications will emerge that will bring numerous benefits as well as challenges in the SG. This paper introduces a power-management approach that is gearedtowards optimizing power distribution, trading, as well as storage amongcooperative microgrids (MGs). The initial task is to formulate the problem as a convex optimization problem and ultimately decompose it into a formulation that jointly considers user utility as well as factors such as MG load variance and associated transmission costs. It is deduced from obtained analytical results that the-formulated generic optimization algorithmcharacterizingboth aggregated demand and response from the cooperative microgrids assist greatly in determining therequired resources hence enabling operational cost viability of the entire system.