A hybrid optimization-based approach to solve environment constrained economic dispatch problem on microgrid system

Generation of electricity comes with the emission of toxic gases into the atmosphere by the fossil fueled generators. Along with the promotion in the utilization of renewable energy sources (RES), it is also the duty of the power engineers to arrive at a compromised solution such that less emission of toxic gases occurs with economic generation of electricity. This paper proposes a balanced trade-off method for solving environment constrained economic dispatch (ECED) problems. A novel comparative analysis is performed among proposed ECED method with existing price-penalty-factor (PPF) and fractional programming (FP) methods for solving combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) problems on a 3-unit dynamic test system to sort out the method, which yields a better trade off solution between generation cost and pollutants emitted. An algorithm, following the hunting strategy of wolves, is improvised by incorporating strategies from population-based sine-cosine algorithm along with position updating methods of crows to form a robust hybrid algorithm, which was used as the optimization tool for the study. Involvement of RES diminished the generation cost to 5.5% for both economic dispatch and PPF based CEED, and 6.5% decrease in emission of pollutants was observed due to the same. The generation cost and amount of emitted pollutants, evaluated using proposed ECED approach, were much closer to the economic dispatch and emission dispatch values respectively compared to PPF based and FP based CEED solution. Furthermore, statistical analysis endorses the superiority of the proposed hybrid optimizer over other algorithms presented in the state-of-art literature.