Optimum Local Energy Trading considering Priorities in a Microgrid

In this paper, the energy sell/purchase for local energy trading is optimized to minimize the energy mismatch in a microgrid. In this microgrid, three groups of houses have been considered, those who have no solar panel or storage, those who have solar panels but no storage and those who have both the solar panel and storage. The houses are also equipped with load shifting capacity. For each of the houses, the difference in energy generation and consumption is forwarded to the control centre and the control centre optimizes the energy trading after which the outcome of the optimization is transmitted to individual houses. Different priorities are assigned to houses according to their consumption pattern and the corresponding optimization problems are solved in multiple stages accordingly. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through numerical simulation, four different scenarios were considered with different energy consumption patterns and load shifting at different houses. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve a reduction in energy mismatch up to 1000W during 09.00 a.m. to 12.00 p.m. for a microgrid with six houses and is more effective compared to the schemes where priorities are not assigned to participants. Moreover, the energy mismatch is further reduced when energy trading is jointly implemented with load shifting.