Optimal Operation Control of PV-Biomass Gasifier-Diesel-Hybrid Systems Using Reinforcement Learning Techniques

The importance of efficient utilization of biomass as renewable energy in terms of global warming and resource shortages are well known and documented. Biomass gasification is a promising power technology especially for decentralized energy systems. Decisive progress has been made in the gasification technologies development during the last decade. This paper deals with the control and optimization problems for an isolated microgrid combining the renewable energy sources (solar energy and biomass gasification) with a diesel power plant. The control problem of an isolated microgrid is formulated as a Markov decision process and we studied how reinforcement learning can be employed to address this problem to minimize the total system cost. The most economic microgrid configuration was found, and it uses biomass gasification units with an internal combustion engine operating both in single-fuel mode (producer gas) and in dual-fuel mode (diesel fuel and producer gas).