On the dispatch of minigrids with large penetration levels of variable renewable energy

Abstract

The continuous use of fossil fuels for decades in electricity generation has led to dire environmental consequences. This has fostered the incorporation of variable renewable energy resources (RES) to improve the environmental outlook and minimize emissions. This paper presents an approach for the dispatch of a minigrid considering variable solar photovoltaic (PV) generation. Due to the variability of the solar irradiance received from the sun during daytime only, solar irradiance is modeled as a stochastic random variable that is fitted into a Beta probability density function (PDF). The minigrid dispatch problem, modeled using stochastic optimization, is then approximated into a linear equivalent to become a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem that can be solved efficiently. The proposed approach is implemented on the modified IEEE 14-bus test system to verify its capability in solving the minigrid dispatch under various test case scenarios.