Congestion Management of Microgrids With Renewable Energy Resources and Energy Storage Systems

With the increasing share of renewable energy resources in the microgrid, the microgrid faces more and more challenges in its reliable operation. One major challenge is the potential congestion caused by the uncoordinated operation of flexible demands such as heat pumps and the high penetration of renewable energy resources such as photovoltaics. Therefore, it is important to conduct microgrid energy management to ensure its reliable operation. The energy storage system (ESS) scheduling as an efficient means to alleviate congestion has been widely used. However, in the existing literature, the ESSs are usually scheduled by the microgrid system operator (MSO) in a direct control manner, which is impractical in the case where customers own ESSs and are willing to schedule ESSs by themselves. To resolve this issue, this study proposes a network reconfiguration integrated dynamic tariff–subsidy (DTS) congestion management method to utilize ESSs and network reconfiguration to alleviate congestion in microgrids caused by renewable energy resources and flexible demands. In the proposed method, the MSO controls sectionalization switches while customers or aggregators schedule ESSs in response to DTS to alleviate congestion. The DTS calculation model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model, considering heat pumps (HPs), ESSs, and reconfigurable microgrid topology. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively use ESSs and network topology to alleviate congestion and the MSO does not need to take over the scheduling of the ESS.