Optimal DER Sizing and Dispatch of CHP for a Remote Educational Microgrid

Electricity demand is increasing tremendously based on high growth in Indian economy. Remote locations which are not connected to the electric grid or the locations with high levels of power shedding increases the concern over energy security. Efforts to improve the power situation in remote locations include integration of distributed generation sources. Since, thermal loads form a significant portion of the total energy consumption, the remote power systems may be developed as multi-energy systems with parallel heat and power networks. To effectively implement such systems, this paper focuses on optimal system sizing and multi-energy dispatch model for combined heat and power (CHP) systems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, a remote school and hostel microgrid has been considered as a multi-energy case study with electrical and water-heating loads. Asset configurations with different distributed energy resources for optimal sizing have been evaluated and compared. Based on the hourly load variation, an effective dispatch strategy has been proposed with solar photovoltaic (PV) and biomass generation systems. The dispatch strategy has been developed as an optimization model and has been implemented for different operating scenarios of the generation system and battery. A comparative economic analysis of hot water load for domestic use and cooking has been considered with waste heat recovery from biomass system and electric system. Optimized result is compared with the existing diesel generator (DG) based solution.