A Stochastic-IGDT model for energy management in isolated microgrids considering failures and demand response

Abstract

In power systems, contingencies and outages are more frequent nowadays due to climate changing effects. This circumstance along equipment aging may lead to unexpected failures and outages in power and energy systems. This issue is especially critical in isolated microgrids, which must be supplied by means of own resources and onsite assets. In these systems, unexpected failures may notably provoke a detriment of the economy and users’ satisfaction. In order to minimize the impact of these incidents, this paper proposes a novel energy management tool for isolated microgrids that are robust against failures. To this end, a novel stochastic-IGDT formulation is developed, by which typical uncertainties are comfortably modelled via scenarios while components’ failures are treated in a robust fashion using IGDT. A solution procedure is proposed in which the operation cost is also considered in order to reproduce useful results and limit the cost of reliability. A variety of simulations are conducted in order to validate the developed model and discuss the particularities derived from considering failures in the energy management task. Moreover, the role of demand response programs is also foregrounded. In particular, the demand response programs allow reducing the operation costs by 3 % while the scheduling result admits up to 13 h more of accumulated failures, thus confirming a positive effect of such initiatives in both economy and robustness against failures.