Impact of demand response management on improving social welfare of remote communities through integrating renewable energy resources

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of demand response (DR) management on improving the social welfare of remote communities by integrating renewable energy (RE) resources into their diesel generator-based isolated microgrids. A multiple-year planning optimization problem is developed to determine the optimal combination of RE resources and energy storage system (ESS) while considering demand response. Demand response is implemented as a means to reschedule a fraction of total daily load to another time in a 24-hour time window. The results confirm that DR helps to improve the total social welfare by maximizing the use of RE resources. It also helps to reduce the need for ESS which is often considered a costly solution for such applications.