Optimal Energy Resource Planning and Combined Heat and Power Sizing in a Residential Area to Supply Electrical and Thermal Demand in a Reconfigured Power Grid

The argument of power systems planning in home microgrids has become one of the burning topics in optimization studies today among the researchers. Since the installation and use of high-capacity energy sources in power systems have many limitations and constraints, so part of the perspective of power systems studies tends to operate residential microgrids. For this purpose, in this paper, operation planning is based on a residential microgrid consisting of combined heat and power (CHP), heat storage tank and boiler, and when possible, surplus electricity is sold to the upstream network to generate revenue. One of the innovations of this paper is the use of the exergy function to complete the optimization and, in practice, combine energy with economics. Other objective functions of this paper are to discuss the reduction of carbon dioxide in the air and the cost of operation. Energy management and planning in this home microgrid is tested with different capacities and types of CHPs, so that the home operator can choose the best mode to use. The multi-stage decision based dynamic programing (MSD-DP) optimization approach is used to minimize the operation costs of proposed framework. The most important innovation of this paper is the use of exergy function for energy management in a residential complex where CHP can also be used to generate electricity and heat simultaneously. Therefore, determining the capacity of CHP and the possibility of exchanging electricity with the upstream network can be mentioned as other innovations of this research.