A Resilient and Privacy-Preserving Energy Management Strategy for Networked Microgrids

This paper presents an energy management strategy for day-ahead scheduling of networked microgrids and is named as nested energy management system. In the proposed nested energy management strategy, the surplus power existing in the inner level microgrids is reflected as a resource and deficit as a load to the outer level microgrids. The operation cost of networked microgrids with nested energy management systems is lesser as compared to conventional decentralized or hybrid energy management strategies. Similarly, due to the inclusion of data (surplus/deficit) from inner level microgrids, customer privacy also increases. In islanded mode, the resilient performance of disconnected microgrids is enhanced due to their ability to form sub-groups. The probability of subgrouping for L-layers of microgrids is given by (L-2)/L. In grid-connected mode, various cases with diverse generation costs at each microgrid level along with the time-of-use market price signals have been evaluated. In islanded mode, the effect of battery energy storage system and disconnection of microgrids from the network have been evaluated. Hybrid ac/dc microgrids have also been considered to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Simulation results have proved the viability of the proposed approach.