Consensus + Innovations Approach for Distributed Multiagent Coordination in a Microgrid

TLDR

Distributed energy resources and demand‑side management are expected to become more prevalent, making efficient coordination of many grid participants a major challenge. The study proposes a distributed energy management approach that uses grid‑wide intelligence to balance supply and demand. The consensus + innovations method coordinates local generation, flexible load, and storage by ensuring equal marginal costs across nonbinding network resources, with solutions for both single‑ and multi‑time‑step optimization including intertemporal constraints.

Abstract

Distributed energy resources and demand-side management are expected to become more prevalent in the future electric power system. Coordinating the increased number of grid participants in an efficient and reliable way is going to be a major challenge. A potential solution is the employment of a distributed energy management approach, which uses intelligence distributed over the grid to balance supply and demand. A distributed energy management approach based on the consensus + innovations method is presented and used to coordinate local generation, flexible load, and storage devices within the microgrid. The approach takes advantage of the fact that, at the optimal allocation settings, the marginal costs given as a function of the power output/consumption need to be equal for all nonbinding network resources. Solutions for single time step, as well as multitime step optimization including intertemporal constraints, are presented.