Seaports are well known as the medium that has evolved into the central link between sea and land for complex marine activities. The growth in maritime logistics particularly necessitates a large volume of energy supply in order to maintain the operation of sea trade, resulting in an imbalance between generation and demand sides. Future projections for three major concerns show an increase in load demand, cost of operation, and environmental issues. In order to overcome these problems, integrating microgrids as an innovative technology in the seaport power system appears to be a vital strategy. It is believed that microgrids enhance seaport operation by providing sustainable, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective energy. Although microgrids are well established and widely used in a variety of operations on land, their incorporation into the seaport is still limited. The involvement of a variety of heavy loads such as all-electric ships, cranes, cold ironing, and buildings infrastructure renders it a complicated arrangement task in several aspects, which necessitates further research and leaves space for improvement. In this paper, an overview of the seaport microgrids in terms of their concepts and operation management is presented. It provides the perspectives for integrating the microgrid concept into a seaport from both shore side and seaside as a smart initiative for the green port’s vision. Future research directions are discussed towards the development of a more efficient marine power system.
The virtual synchronous generator (VSG) control has been extensively applied for realizing grid-friendly interconnections of power converters. Nevertheless, due to the direct shaft dynamics emulation, low-frequency power oscillations may be introduced in the case of limited damping effects. To solve this issue, power control law modifications have been proposed based on the feedback control theory. Although power oscillations can be suppressed to an acceptable level, the original inertial response of VSG will be significantly degraded. This paper proposes a new damping method based on the reference feed forward (RFF) control. The proposed method is able to effectively attenuate poorly-damped power oscillations in VSG-controlled converters without affecting the original inertial response. Theoretical analysis and effectiveness of the proposed damping method have been validated by both EMT simulations and experiments.
<span>The building sector is attributed to approximately 40% of the nation’s energy consumption and this accounts for a significant percentage of the nation’s energy consumption. For this reason, energy efficiency in buildings has now become an important subject in the national energy scenario. Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) is one of the energy consumption indicators that is widely used in the building sector for measuring energy performance. This index is generally measured based on the energy used per unit of building floor area. However, this index is not able to directly identify other factors affecting energy usage. This paper suggests an Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) for determining the performance of lecturer rooms in a university building. Unlike the conventional EEI, the proposed EEI determines the room’s energy usage performance by considering the number of occupants. The study was conducted at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and the results show that the number of occupants significantly influences the energy usage performance of rooms in a university building.</span>
Microgrids are among the promising green transition technologies that will provide enormous benefits to the seaports to manage major concerns over energy crises, environmental challenges, and economic issues. However, creating a good design for the seaport microgrid is a challenging task, considering different objectives, constraints, and uncertainties involved. To ensure the optimal operation of the system, determining the right microgrid configuration and component size at minimum cost is a vital decision at the design stage. This paper aims to design a hybrid system for a seaport microgrid with optimally sized components. The selected case study is the Port of Aalborg, Denmark. The proposed grid-connected structure consists of renewable energy sources (photovoltaic system and wind turbines), an energy storage system, and cold ironing facilities. The seaport architecture is then optimized by utilizing HOMER to meet the maximum load demand by considering important parameters such as solar global horizontal irradiance, temperature, and wind resources. Finally, the best configuration is analyzed in terms of economic feasibility, energy reliability, and environmental impacts.
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