Look-ahead economic dispatch of microgrids with energy storage, using linear programming

Microgrids can provide economic benefits, and those benefits can be maximized through intelligent control. This paper applies a fast and reliable linear programming (LP) approach to the economic dispatch of grid-tied microgrids containing any or all of the following resources: conventional generators, energy storage, demand response resources, and non-dispatchable resources (e.g. solar or wind). The proposed method minimizes the cost to operate the microgrid while meeting various resource constraints. Forecast load and renewable resource power profiles are used to generate linear constraints. Storage conversion losses, which can be much more significant in microgrids, are innovatively accounted for within LP using auxiliary variables. Non-linear constraints on the dispatchable resources are applied by preprocessing the input to LP and post-processing its output.