Operations of a microgrid with renewable energy integration and line switching

With the development of new technologies and their integration to the conventional power grid, the smart grid with the capacity of satisfying power demand by large amount of renewable energy is emerging. Microgrid, a small-scale power system with clearly defined electrical boundaries and ability of self-supply, especially by distributed renewable energy, plays a big role in this process. In this paper, we study the operations of a microgrid with solar photovoltaic generators, energy storage system, and power exchanges with main power grid. More specifically, a mixed integer programming model is formulated for decision-making, such as scheduling of generators within the microgrid, islanding operations through line switching and power trades between microgrid and the main grid, charging and discharging operations of storage system, and also line switching within the microgrid, by robust optimization for capturing the uncertainties of solar power generation. To solve the robust optimization formulation, we formulate our model in order to apply the column-and-constraint generation algorithm, and perform numerical experiments on several test cases to validate the proposed model and algorithm.