Investigating the necessity of distribution markets in accomodating high penetration microgrids

The increased need for reliable, resilient, and high quality power combined with a falling cost of distributed generation technologies has resulted in a rapid growth of microgrid in power systems. Although providing multitude of benefits, the microgrid power transfer with the main grid, which is commonly obtained using economy and reliability consideration, may result in major operational drawbacks, most notably, a large mismatch between actual and forecasted system loads. This paper investigates the impact of high penetration microgrids on the power system net load, and further proposes three paradigms that can be adopted to address the emerging operational issues. The IEEE 6-bus test system is used for numerical studies and to further support the discussions.