Microgrid Reliability Evaluation Using Distributed Energy Storage Systems

Reliability assessment of power systems is a very important factor to judge utilities and suppliers. Many suppliers lose millions of dollars because of the failure happening in their systems. Although these failures are out of control and cannot be avoided strictly, there are methods developed to enhance the reliability of power systems to minimize the number of failures and they work very efficiently. Integrating an energy storage system (ESS) with the power system is one of these methods to enhance the reliability. This paper presents the effects of integrating an ESS with a microgrid on the reliability evaluation and compares between the reliability indices of the microgrid without the ESS and with it. Also, dynamic programming is used to solve the unit commitment problem in both cases to calculate the production cost in both cases. The simulation results and numerical analysis depict the effectiveness of the proposed approach.