Evaluating efficiency of renewable energy sources in planning micro-grids considering uncertainties

Nowadays, the renewable energy sources (RES) are widely utilized in micro-grids due totechnical development and emission increase, which make the planning the micro-grids integratedthe RES very important. To obtain the optimal planning strategy and evaluating efficiency of theRES in micro-grids, a mixed integer programming (MIP) planning framework for a gridconnectedmicro-grid is presented in this study. The understudy micro-grid consists of the windturbines and photovoltaic systems, which are connected to utility grid through the point ofcommon coupling (PCC). The objective function is minimizing the life cycle cost of objectcomprising of the investment and operation cost of the RES, the energy purchased cost from theutility grid, the emission taxes cost and the replacement cost or residual value of equipment at theend of the planning period. The uncertainties of load, electrical price, wind speed and solarradiation are taken into consideration and then a combinable model with the clustering techniqueis utilized to integrate them. Finally, numerical simulations for a test grid-connected micro-gridare made to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and show efficiency of the RES tocan apply to practical micro-grids. © 2019 Published by peer-reviewed open access scientific journal.