Optimal Energy Storage-Grid Coordination for Hospitals: Prototype Development

In this paper, we develop a controller prototype of a hospital's microgrid energy management system, which integrates distributed energy resources to increase resilience and sustainability. We define the resilience objective as restoration of power within a few minutes of the outage and continued power supply to the critical loads for power outages that last 48 hours or more. We define the sustainability goal as a reduction of the yearly operating hours of distributed generation. The proposed controller prototype allows for the optimal economical operation of the energy resources at the hospital while attempting to achieve the resilience and reliability goals. We use a Raspberry Pi Model 3B+ to form and solve the optimization problem and implement the resulting controller decisions. An Arduino device collects data in real-time for energy metering. We built a prototype where the controller is interfaced with three low-voltage DC buses, with loads attached to them, to demonstrate the adequacy of our proposed controller.