Capacity and Control Strategy Design of Isolated Micro-Grid With High Renewable Penetration

Currently, many remote communities rely on costly diesel engine (DE) generators as their only energy resource. Therefore, to reduce cost and CO2 emissions, renewable energy such as photovoltaic (PV) power is widely used. However, such integration may have reliability issues due to intermittency and uncertainty of PV power. Hence, energy storage is further implemented to compensate for the variability of PV output. As a result, the critical problem is to find an optimized PV-storage control strategy and capacity considering the techno-economic aspects, cost, and reliability. Previous research has not provided convincing results due to the little attention paid to the practical operational constraints of existing DEs (time delay management, spinning reserve strategies, ramp rate, etc.), and rough hourly usage data in a time-series model. Besides, no applicable systematic evaluation method has been established. This paper develops a new model which fully considers the DE generator's operational characteristics. Furthermore, based on the recorded 1-min load and PV generation data in a real microgrid, a systematic evaluation method is proposed, which searches for the best results for both control strategies and capacities of all components. This method can be utilized for the integration of high renewable (PV) penetration into existing DE powered remote networks.