Optimal control to minimize operating costs and emissions of MV autonomous micro-grids with renewable energy sources

The paper is intended to propose an optimal control strategy for autonomous micro-grids that focuses on the possibility to minimize the overall micro-grid operating cost, borne by the micro-grid operator in order to provide power distribution to customers, while minimizing the pollutants emissions and assuming that all the power made available by the renewable energy sources is injected into the micro-grid. The proposed procedure can be implemented thanks to a hierarchical control architecture. The optimization procedure has been verified by computer simulations on a test network. The numerical results show that it is possible to find optimal feasible solutions that improve the operating conditions of the micro-grid with respect to the ones obtained as a result of the generators local control.