Distributed control for energy management in a microgrid

Microgrid is an effective approach to manage renewable resource generations, energy storage systems and various loads to provide high quality power. Due to the intermittence of renewable generation, as well as constantly changing load demand, energy storage systems are often proposed to balance supply-demand in the microgrid. To address the issues of centralized control strategies, i.e. single point failure, information congestion, etc., this paper proposes a distributed suboptimal control strategy to maintain the supply-demand balance by controlling the battery storage system. Only information exchange among neighboring nodes is required, therefore, the computation and communication burden is allocated to local controllers to avoid the investment of expensive and powerful central controller. The stability of the proposed control algorithm is proved by rigid analysis. Comparison between the proposed distributed control and centralized optimal control strategy is conducted, and the effectiveness of the proposed control solution is demonstrated by the simulation results. The scalability of the proposed distributed algorithm has been tested with 1000-bus system.