Combined Operations of Renewable Energy Systems and Responsive Demand in a Smart Grid

TLDR

Integrating renewable energy sources into smart grids is challenging because of their intermittent nature, and enabling consumer participation is essential to reduce overall energy costs. This paper proposes an energy management system to optimize smart grid operation. The EMS aggregates distributed resources, participates in the open market, and its performance was validated on a 23‑bus, 11‑kV distribution network. The system improves renewable energy utilization, lowers customer costs, and enhances grid resilience and flexibility by enabling DSOs to respond to real‑time price signals.

Abstract

The integration of renewable energy systems (RESs) in smart grids (SGs) is a challenging task, mainly due to the intermittent and unpredictable nature of the sources, typically wind or sun. Another issue concerns the way to support the consumers' participation in the electricity market aiming at minimizing the costs of the global energy consumption. This paper proposes an energy management system (EMS) aiming at optimizing the SG's operation. The EMS behaves as a sort of aggregator of distributed energy resources allowing the SG to participate in the open market. By integrating demand side management (DSM) and active management schemes (AMS), it allows a better exploitation of renewable energy sources and a reduction of the customers' energy consumption costs with both economic and environmental benefits. It can also improve the grid resilience and flexibility through the active participation of distribution system operators (DSOs) and electricity supply/demand that, according to their preferences and costs, respond to real-time price signals using market processes. The efficiency of the proposed EMS is verified on a 23-bus 11-kV distribution network.