Environmental/economic scheduling of a micro-grid with renewable energy resources

Nowadays, modern power grids are moving towards using alternative energy sources, as the fossil fuel reserves are exhausting and international societies worry about the environmental effects by conventional electric power generation systems. In this regard, this paper implements the scheduling of energy sources in a micro-grid including different power sources like photo voltaic, fuel cell, battery units, wind turbine and micro turbine. Besides, this paper proposes a multi-objective framework for the optimal scheduling of a micro-grid in order to concurrently minimize the total operation cost and minimize the emission caused by generating units. For this end, lexicographic optimization and hybrid augmented-weighted epsilon-constraint method have been employed to solve the multi-objective optimization problem and generate the Pareto optimal solutions. The decision making process has been performed using a fuzzy technique. Afterwards, the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method are verified using two case studies. Besides, the results of the proposed method are compared to those obtained from other methods recently employed. Finally, it is indicated that incorporating the lexicographic optimization and hybrid augmented epsilon-constraint technique lead to superior solutions in the case of operation cost, emission and execution time. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.