An integrated two-level distributed dispatch for interconnected microgrids considering unit commitment and transmission loss

Interconnected microgrids or a microgrid cluster (MGC) can enable mutual power support among microgrids and can improve the utilization of renewable energy sources. However, most of the distributed optimization focuses only on day-ahead or day-in dispatch, and few studies have attempted to study the integrated two-level distributed optimization. On the basis of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), this paper describes an efficient two-level distributed algorithm framework to solve multi-area ED problems in MGC considering unit commitment and transmission loss. Specifically, to overcome the non-convexity, a choice and comparison approach is introduced to cooperate with power-based ADMM for searching feasible binary variables in the first level, i.e., day-ahead dispatch. Voltage-based ADMM is adopted to obtain the relevant intra-day scheduling plan considering tie-line transmission loss among different areas in the second level. Moreover, a spinning reserve-based chance-constrained programming procedure is added to address uncertainty factors such as renewable energy fluctuations and load forecasting errors in isolated microgrids. Finally, a consensus-based cost allocation is proposed to fairly clear the expenses among microgrids. A case study with several networked microgrids is tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Published under license by AIP Publishing.