Optimal energy management of MG for cost-effective operations and battery scheduling using BWO

The rapid growth of renewable standalone systems, with their inherent uncertainties and intermittency, poses a huge challenge to system stability. In this paper, an intelligent microgrid is proposed that fully utilizes the complementarity characteristics in PV and battery storage system (BESS), and is capable of maintaining an economic, reliable, and environmental equilibrium in daily generation scheduling. A black widow optimization (BWO) based controller is designed to determine the best possible solution under different scheduling scenarios. In addition, an exponential cost function based on the battery's degree of discharge (DOD) is introduced to calculate the battery generation cost. It will include the battery lifetime cost in the overall power generation cost. Furthermore, the cost of the diesel generator includes the CO2 emission cost which is inversely proportional to the generator efficiency. The BWO algorithm optimized the generation cost based on these functions and increase the reliability of the grid using reliability index. The BWO algorithm finds the optimal global solution in less than 30 iterations and avoid the local optima problem. The effectiveness and convergence speed of BWO is far better than other algorithms and is validated by simulation results.