Microgrids represent an emerging paradigm of future electric power systems that can utilize both distributed and centralized generations. Two recent trends in microgrids are the integration of local renewable energy sources (such as wind farms) and the use of co-generation (i.e., to supply both electricity and heat). However, these trends also bring unprecedented challenges to the design of intelligent control strategies for microgrids. Traditional generation scheduling paradigms rely on perfect prediction of future electricity supply and demand. They are no longer applicable to microgrids with unpredictable renewable energy supply and with co-generation (that needs to consider both electricity and heat demand). In this paper, we study online algorithms for the microgrid generation scheduling problem with intermittent renewable energy sources and co-generation, with the goal of maximizing the cost-savings with local generation. Based on the insights from the structure of the offline optimal solution, we propose a class of competitive online algorithms, called CHASE (Competitive Heuristic Algorithm for Scheduling Energy-generation), that track the offline optimal in an online fashion. Under typical settings, we show that CHASE achieves the best competitive ratio among all deterministic online algorithms, and the ratio is no larger than a small constant 3.
However, these studies assume the demand and energy supply (or their distributions) in the entire time horizon are known . As such, the schemes are not readily applicable to microgrid scenarios where accurate prediction of small-scale demand and wind power generation is difficult to obtain due to limited management resources and their unpredictable nature @cite_32 .
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This paper presents a security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) algorithm which takes into account the intermittency and volatility of wind power generation. The UC problem is solved in the master problem with the forecasted intermittent wind power generation. Next, possible scenarios are simulated for representing the wind power volatility. The initial dispatch is checked in the subproblem and generation redispatch is considered for satisfying the hourly volatility of wind power in simulated scenarios. If the redispatch fails to mitigate violations, Benders cuts are created and added to the master problem to revise the commitment solution. The iterative process between the commitment problem and the feasibility check subproblem will continue until simulated wind power scenarios can be accommodated by redispatch. Numerical simulations indicate the effectiveness of the proposed SCUC algorithm for managing the security of power system operation by taking into account the intermittency and volatility of wind power generation.