Integrated Intelligent Power Management Strategy (IIPMS) to Optimize Green Energy Usage in Standalone Microgrid

The increasing demand for renewable and clean energy has mandated the research for maximizing the energy extraction from the available sources. It is also essential to devise the generation systems in such a way as to optimize the usage of all the available resources in the area with minimum dependency on non-renewable sources. The system design should also consider the costs involved for installation, generation and maintenance and make it affordable to the common masses to ensure effective utilization. This paper proposes a power management algorithm of a microgrid comprising of PV, wind, DG and a battery. The complementary nature of wind and solar power gives the advantage that the availability of renewable energy is there throughout the day, thus reduces the usage of DG. The microgrid is optimally sized using PSO algorithm. The power management algorithm runs in two stages, source side management and Demand side management. The inputs to the source side management algorithm are original load schedule and renewable forecast for the day. The output of the algorithm shows the contribution of each source over the day. The DSM algorithm analyzes the usage of various sources and shifts parts of loads to reduce the DG usage. The strategy is intelligent as it checks the availability of renewable energy and dynamically shifts the load so that DG usage will be minimized.