A Planning Platform for Droop-based Isolated Microgrids

Isolated microgrids are operated based on droop characteristics in terms of frequency-active power and voltage-reactive power to evenly share active and reactive powers among their dispatchable DGs. Although active powers are accurately distributed among the different DGs, there is an inherent error in the sharing of reactive powers. This error is a function of the DGs’ locations, and accordingly, should be addressed in the planning. This paper presents a planning platform to simultaneously site and size DGs and capacitor banks (CBs) for isolated microgrids that takes into account the operational characteristics at the planning stage. For this aim, a suitable power flow that considers the specific features of isolated microgrids is employed along with an additional constraint that is introduced to the planning. Loads’ and DGs’ intermittent behaviors are modelled through a probabilistic model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed planning approach, the PG& E 69-bus system has been used.