Multi-Microgrids for Enhancing Power System Resilience in Response to the Increasingly Frequent Natural Hazards

The increasingly frequent natural disasters highlight the necessity of improving power system resilience. This paper proposes a hierarchical energy management framework based on multi-microgrids for resilience enhancement. According to the framework, when power supply from the main grid is interrupted, the microgrids go into isolation mode and optimally sustain the power supply through a two-stage scheme. In the first stage, each microgrid reschedules its available resources to minimize the load curtailment and operation cost using the rolling horizon optimization. A demand-side management method based on load classification is designed for isolated microgrids. In the second stage, the microgrids with surplus power capacities export power to support those microgrids with load curtailment. In doing so, a consensus algorithm is applied for microgrids distributed communication to determine the power exchange plan. The optimization model is formulated as a mix-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and can be readily solved by commercial software. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in improving the resilience. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.