Efficient management of locally generated powers in micro grids

A residential micro grid is a sub-section of the grid associated to a small village or a neighborhood that includes distributed energy sources. In order to sustain the loads of the micro grid, power can be provided either by the utility or by the distributed sources at costs that depend on the energy market. In this chapter we focus on optimizing the energy sources in order to minimize the cost incurred by the micro grid, to make it smarter. In our model costs are proportional to the injected power. Transmission line losses, that may significantly contribute to the waste of energy and cost rise, are also taken into account in the optimization process. We both investigate the optimal solution to the problem, which is computationally expensive, and a suboptimal solution based on the steepest descent algorithm.