Bi-level distributed day-ahead schedule for islanded multi-microgrids in a carbon trading market

Abstract Distributed energy management of multi-microgrids (MMGs) system is essential to achieving energy coordination in a large area while protecting the privacy. Compared with existing work, we consider the detailed modeling of demand-side resources and aim to reduce carbon emission. Concretely, we propose a bi-level distributed day-ahead schedule model for the islanded MMGs under a carbon trading market. The upper level minimizes the operation and carbon trading cost of the cluster. The nonlinear power flow constraints are relaxed by second order cone constraints. The distributed modeling method for the introduced variables is proposed on the basis of the tie lines splitting method, and the upper level model is solved by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM); the lower level is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and aims to achieve the self-organizing of each microgrid (MG). During the iteration, each MG communicates with its neighbors and solves the problem separately, which protects the privacy and reduces the communication burden. Finally, a case study of the MMGs with four MGs is carried out. The proposed method is confirmed to have good convergence performance and can produce reasonable results. And the effect of the carbon trading price on the system is analyzed.