Volume 16: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part V

A Quantitative Approach of Microgrids Performance Assessment at the Planning Stage Jianing Luo, Shengwei Wang, Hangxin Li

Abstract

A microgrid, as a typical low-carbon energy system, has gained great attentions in the last decade. Most studies focused on improving the system performance at the design and control stages while the evaluation of the system performance at the planning stage is usually ignored. Commonly, three key indicators (cost, renewable energy penetration, and reliability) are used to evaluate the system performance. The cost and/or the renewable energy penetration are set as the objectives while the reliability is set as a constraint in design/control optimization. However, due to lacking adequate investigations of system performance at the planning stage, fewer supports are provided in energy policy formulation. This study, therefore, proposed a quantitative approach to evaluate the system performance in terms of these three indicators at the planning stage. By using the proposed model, optimization algorithm, and regression analysis, these three indicators are quantified. A case study is proposed to test and verify this approach. Three different reliability requirements are adopted. In the end, a reasonable range (40%-60%) of renewable energy penetration is recommended. The system performance of the cost-saving (the largest one as 61.5%) is evaluated based on three ratios of reliability requirements and renewable penetration ratios.

Keywords planning stage, microgrid optimization, renewable penetration, reliability