Energy management of microgrids with renewables using soft computing techniques

Distributed economic dispatch for a microgrid in grid-connected mode with renewable energy is considered in this paper. The objective of minimizing the microgrid net cost accounts for conventional distributed generation cost, utility of elastic loads, penalized cost of distributed storage, and a worst-case transaction cost. The objective function is split into two parts and the generation costs and the worst case transaction costs are minimized individually as well as the entire microgrid net cost is optimized as a whole. The optimization is done using three metaheuristic soft computing algorithms and comparative study among the three is studied. Numerical results are reported to corroborate the effectiveness of the novel approach.