Lightweight energy management of islanded operated microgrids for prosumer communities

The paper presents and evaluates a lightweight and effective approach for the management of prosumer communities through the synergistic control of the power electronic converters acting therein. These controllable elements are the utility interface (UI), installed at the point of common coupling with the electrical utility, and the energy gateways (EGs), interfacing distributed generation units and energy storage devices with the distribution grid. The UI acts as the control master for the microgrid, collecting information on generators and power demand and dispatching a control parameter that regulates both energy storage devices and generators. An islanded operation mode is considered, and the control strategy aims at leveling peaks in the energy drained from or injected into the UI. The proposed control strategy is tested on a residential microgrid model, 100 kVA rated, which has been developed and utilized to analyze selected performance metrics in the presence of realistic and time varying power demand and energy generation processes. This model allows a fine-grained analysis of (a) the energy storage state at each residential unit, (b) the amount of energy required at the UI, and (c) the locally generated energy injected into the micro grid by each EG. As a further result, our framework returns the amount of distributed storage required to achieve a target peak-shaving performance level, according to the number of residential users with generation capability and their storage capacity.