Decentralized energy management is of paramount importance in smart
microgrids with renewables for various reasons including environmental
friendliness, reduced communication overhead, and resilience to failures. In
this context, the present work deals with distributed economic dispatch and
demand response initiatives for grid-connected microgrids with high-penetration
of wind power. To cope with the challenge of the wind's intrinsically
stochastic availability, a novel energy planning approach involving the actual
wind energy as well as the energy traded with the main grid, is introduced. A
stochastic optimization problem is formulated to minimize the microgrid net
cost, which includes conventional generation cost as well as the expected
transaction cost incurred by wind uncertainty. To bypass the prohibitively
high-dimensional integration involved, an efficient sample average
approximation method is utilized to obtain a solver with guaranteed
convergence. Leveraging the special infrastructure of the microgrid, a
decentralized algorithm is further developed via the alternating direction
method of multipliers. Case studies are tested to corroborate the merits of the
novel approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE GreenTech 2014. Submitted Sept. 2013; accepted Dec.
201