Controlling the renewable microgrid using semidefinite programming technique

Abstract Given the significant concerns regarding carbon emissions from fossil fuels, global warming and energy crisis, renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) are going to be integrated in smart grids, which will make the energy supply more reliable and decrease the costs and transmission losses. Unfortunately, one of the key technical challenges in power system planning, control and operation with DERs is the voltage regulation at the distribution level. This problem stimulates the deployment of smart sensors and actuators in smart grids so that the voltage can be stabilized. The observation from the microgrid incorporating DERs is transmitted to the control center via wireless communication systems. In other words, the proposed communication infrastructure provides an opportunity to address the voltage regulation challenge by offering the two-way communication links for microgrid state information collection, estimation and stabilization. Based on the communication infrastructure, we propose a least square based Kalman filter algorithm for state estimation and an optimal feedback control framework for stabilizing the microgrid states. Specifically, we propose to optimize the performance index by using semidefinite programming techniques in the context of smart grid applications. At the end, the efficacy of the developed approaches is demonstrated using a microgrid incorporating multiple DERs.