Online Cooperative Feedback Control of Residential Community Microgrids with 100% Renewable Energy

The emerging of renewable distributed energy resources (DER) in the residential community opens the door to forming a residential community microgrid for enhancing energy resiliency when the main grid is out of service. However, traditional microgrid controls via the hierarchical feedforward tertiary, secondary, and primary control framework may not be effective for such residential community microgrids, because of high volatility, low inertia, and insufficiency of DERs along with limited supporting facilities. This paper discusses an online feedback scheme, which cooperates the three control layers in real time to ensure operational stability of the microgrid. Besides, to economically dispatch scarce DERs in the tertial feedback control, this paper deduces an increment cost model of battery storage assets based on their degradation costs and depth of discharges. The model is of low computational complexity, thus can be naturally embedded in the proposed online cooperative feedback control scheme to calculate marginal price in real-time. Small-signal analysis and Simulink simulation are conducted to illustrate stability of the proposed online cooperative feedback control scheme, and its economic advantages over the traditional feedforward control scheme

A Business Model Incorporating Harmonic Control as a Value-added Service for Utility-owned Electricity Retailers

With the deepening of electricity market reform in China, the competition in the electricity retail market becomes increasingly intense. Electricity retailers (ERs) need to explore new business models to enhance their competitiveness in the retail market. Meanwhile, with the improvement of industrial production and people's living standards, more and more nonlinear electrical equipment have been put into use, leading to severe harmonic pollution problems. Harmonic pollution causes loss of electricity, resulting in the economic loss of customers, especially for large industrial customers. In the above contexts, this paper proposes a novel business model that incorporates harmonic control as a value-added service into electricity retail contracts for utility-owned ERs. Both utility-owned ERs and customers can benefit from the designed business model. For customers, it helps them to improve the power quality while saving the electricity cost. For ERs, it helps them to cultivate the customer loyalty and improve the customer satisfaction. A case study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed business model