Intelligent Energy Management Systems for Optimal Techno-Commercial Benefit in DC Micro-grids: A Review

Abstract

The demand for clean, high quality and low rate Electrical Energy is on rising scale in the last decade. Both the traditional ways of generating power and delivering the same through long transmission lines are less appreciated due to the cost associated and also the detrimental effects on environment. Renewable Energy Sources (RES) may be achieved clean if smart integration of the same. Present micro-grids are supported by energy management systems (EMS) which only optimise resource management to supply continuous power to the consumers. The economic considerations such as costing profile of the sources, demand response and price discovery along with technological considerations like power quality assessment and standardisation is however, absent in these systems. Moreover, the EMS developed are location and operational condition specific that is these EMS cannot be programmed as per the requirement of the user. Hence the present EMS in use, in islanded or off-grid condition may not select the appropriate source to cater the demand requested and also is not flexible enough. Also the EMS can be developed in a way that all the information and constraints can be programmed in it. Some optimisation techniques can be used to solve the objective function. In addition to this, the intelligent EMS is proposed to improve the power quality by continuously monitoring a few standard performance indices. Though the work is based on off grid independent micro grid but the EMS will be developed with such an algorithm for both mode of operation -islanded and conventional so that which can provide benefits for off-grid operations also.