Dispatch techniques for Canadian remote communities with renewable sources

The appropriate dispatch of Load Shifting Devices (LSD) and Renewable Energy Sources (RES) is still a challenging issue for the Remote Community (RC). This paper analyzes three techniques for the economic dispatch of a RC microgrid that implements RES and LSDs as in the case of Energy Storage Systems (ESS) to a diesel infrastructure. Two online or period-ahead techniques are compared to an offline mathematical formulation of a PV-ESS-Diesel system for an hourly-based annual simulation. A new online method, based on the average cost curve of a generator is introduced as it consists in a combination between the closed mathematical formulation of a classic offline technique and the online capabilities of a Knowledge-Based Expert System (KBES). An application of the three techniques over the same benchmark shows that by the introduction of a load shifting capability of approximately 25% of the peak, for all three methods the RC is able to save around 3% of the overall diesel consumption of a PV-Diesel Microgrid (MG).