Analyzing flexibility options for microgrid management from economical operational and environmental perspectives

Power grids have undergone a massive transformation due to increasing number of renewable/non renewable distributed generators, storage technologies and electrical vehicles. This paper focuses on the flexible energy management of grid connected microgrid (MG) in order to analyze the effects of the flexibility options such as electric vehicle with demand response (EV -DR), battery storage system (BSS), hydrogen storage system (HSS) and dynamic line rating (DLR) in presence of renewable sources. In addition, microturbine (MT), fuel cell (FC), biomass (BIO), geothermal (GEO), and diesel engine (DIE) whose output is controllable are also considered as flexible sources. In this paper, optimum operation of grid-connected MG is modeled as a mixed-integer linear programming problem considering uncertainties of wind turbine (WT) and photovoltaic (PV) sources. A day-ahead forecasting of irradiance and wind speed are performed with Decision Tree Regression (DTR) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms for sensitive calculation of PV and WT output. The cost function merges operating costs including fuel, operation & maintains (O&M), depletion costs with emission cost of CO2, SO2, and NOx. Obtained numerical results show that total cost of the MG is reduced by 9.40% and emission cost is diminished by 5.59% with inclusion of all considered flexibility options. Further, load factor is improved from 0.7932 to 0.8236 with 100% flexibility condition for MG.