Analysis of Differential Evolution Variants for Optimal Sizing of Autonomous Microgrid

With the rising demand of electrical energy and rapid depletion of fossil fuel, the world is moving towards the trend of using more and more renewable energy sources. Amongst many renewable resources wind power generation, solar photovoltaic (PhV) and biomass system is achieving high popularity in present years owing to the availability advantages. The objective of this paper is to determine optimal sizing of an autonomous micro grid comprising of solar, wind and biomass generators. A population-based optimization technique, differential evolution (DE) has been used for its ability to quickly explore large decision areas. Four different variants of DE comprising of standard DE, jDE, SaDE and MMsDE have been implemented. In order to improve the analysis, two different load cases are presented. The result demonstrates that for lower load SaDE is optimum strategy and for higher load jDE is more suitable.