Energy Management in Microgrids with Renewable Energy Sources: A Literature Review

Abstract

Renewable energy sources have emerged as an alternative to meet the growing demand for energy, mitigate climate change, and contribute to sustainable development. The integration of these systems is carried out in a distributed manner via microgrid systems; this provides a set of technological solutions that allows information exchange between the consumers and the distributed generation centers, which implies that they need to be managed optimally. Energy management in microgrids is defined as an information and control system that provides the necessary functionality, which ensures that both the generation and distribution systems supply energy at minimal operational costs. This paper presents a literature review of energy management in microgrid systems using renewable energies, along with a comparative analysis of the different optimization objectives, constraints, solution approaches, and simulation tools applied to both the interconnected and isolated microgrids. To manage the intermittent nature of renewable energy, energy storage technology is considered to be an attractive option due to increased technological maturity, energy density, and capability of providing grid services such as frequency response. Finally, future directions on predictive modeling mainly for energy storage systems are also proposed.

A Three-Stage Coordinated Optimization Scheduling Strategy for a CCHP Microgrid Energy Management System

“…Compared to other prediction methods, the gray prediction method does not need to determine whether the renewable energy and the thermal power fluctuations follow a normal distribution and does not require large sample statistics. There is also no need to change the prediction model at any time based on changes in renewable energy and hot and cold power [28]. Its predictive model is easy to operate and has short-term precision, which is more suitable for online ultrashort-term forecasting.…”

Special Issue on Standalone Renewable Energy System: Modeling and Controlling

“…However, the optimal design and operation of the hybrid off-grid systems is a difficult task, as there are many non-linear variables involved which imply that advanced optimization techniques must be used in some cases [5], for example heuristic techniques (genetic algorithms and others). Energy management in mini-and micro-grids with different sources of generation and energy storage is also non-trivial [2,6]. The optimal management of the planning is very important when the system includes fossil-fuel generators (diesel, gasoline) and batteries [7], in order to reduce fuel consumption and enhance battery lifetime.…”

“…Systems of higher power are called micro-or mini-grids, which can supply several households or even a whole village. Mini-or micro-grids, powered by renewable sources, can be classified as smart grids, allowing information exchange between the consumers and the distributed generation [2].…”

Hybrid Micro-Grids Exploiting Renewables Sources, Battery Energy Storages, and Bi-Directional Converters

“…The control of the energy fluxes should consider the expected level of energy production (even with possible short and middle term forecasts), the expected demand coming from the user side and the costs, both positive and negative, associated with the power exchange toward the grid. The open research problem is in finding the optimal algorithms with which the energy fluxes are managed and considering the constraints given by the limits in maximum power and maximum energy, which characterize the ESS used in the micro-grid [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45].…”