Optimal Bidding Strategy for Microgrids Considering Renewable Energy and Building Thermal Dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we study an optimal day-ahead pricebased power scheduling problem for a community-scale microgrid (MG). The proposed optimization framework aims to balance between maximizing the expected benefit of the MG in the deregulated electricity market and minimizing the MG operation cost considering users' thermal comfort requirements and other system constraints. The power scheduling and bidding problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic program where various system uncertainties are captured by using the Monte Carlo simulation approach. Our formulation is novel in that it can exploit the thermal dynamic characteristics of buildings to compensate for the variable and intermittent nature of renewable energy resources and enables us to achieve desirable tradeoffs for different conflicting design objectives. Extensive numerical results are presented to demonstrate the great benefits in exploiting the building thermal dynamics and the flexibility of the proposed scheduling method in achieving different practical design tradeoffs. We also investigate the impacts of different design and system parameters on the curtailment of renewable energy resources and the optimal expected profit of the MG.Index Terms-Building thermal dynamics, climate comfort requirement, day-ahead market, optimal biding strategy.

Retail Energy Management in Electricity Markets: Structure, Challenges and Economic Aspects- a Review

“…The retailers can procure electrical energy in the wholesale electricity market through two different resources: (1) wholesale markets and (2) wholesale contracts. Considering the wholesale market, Day-ahead Market (DAM) [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], Real Time Market (RTM) [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], Reserve Market (RM) [15,21,22] and Intraday Market (IDM) [20] are the most common markets used by retailers to purchase their obligated energy. Moreover, regarding the wholesale contracts, future contracts [17,26,29], forward contracts [16,18,23,30], call option [23,30] and swing contracts [25,28] are typically used in different studies of retail market.…”

“…In this regard, intermittent power production facilities, i.e. RERs, may increase the complexity of retail problem due to the uncertain characteristic of output power [14,32,36]. On the other hand, some retailers prefer to procure their obligated energy from deterministic power production units, e.g.…”

“…These programs are mainly used by DR providers to increase the efficiency of power system in term of cost and reliability. In addition to DR programs, voluntary and mandatory load curtailment programs are proposed in some studies to increase the efficiency of retail market [14,23]. Demand response providers can aggregate different DR programs to reduce the demand level of retailers when the wholesale electricity price is high.…”

“…A general approach to prevent from exercising market power by strategic players is to increase competition among market participants. In the literature about the retail energy management, many research studies have addressed the retail electricity market with monopolistic competition (imperfect market) [14][15][16][17][31][32][33]. In these studies, only one retailer is considered for the problem.…”

Optimal air-conditioning load control in distribution network with intermittent renewables

“…In [12], the authors proposed a direct load control scheme for the ACLs based on the distributed imperialist competitive algorithm to minimize total operation cost over the whole dispatch horizon. In [13], the authors exploited the thermal characteristics of buildings to compensate for the renewable power fluctuations and reduce the renewable energy curtailment. In [14], the authors proposed a method to minimize the interconnection point power flow fluctuation by controlling the distributed controllable loads and renewable resources.…”