Control Strategies for Microgrids With Distributed Energy Storage Systems: An Overview

TLDR

Power networks are shifting from centralized generation to decentralized microgrids with distributed energy storage, which provide diverse services but increase control complexity and require scalable, disturbance‑robust strategies. This review surveys the state‑of‑the‑art control strategies for coordinating distributed energy storage in microgrids, highlighting their services, challenges, and the promise of multi‑agent intelligent control for future research. The authors present and compare decentralized, centralized, and distributed multi‑agent control approaches that coordinate distributed storage systems within microgrids.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the state of the art control strategies specifically designed to coordinate distributed energy storage (ES) systems in microgrids. Power networks are undergoing a transition from the traditional model of centralised generation towards a smart decentralised network of renewable sources and ES systems, organised into autonomous microgrids. ES systems can provide a range of services, particularly when distributed throughout the power network. The introduction of distributed ES represents a fundamental change for power networks, increasing the network control problem dimensionality and adding long time-scale dynamics associated with the storage systems' state of charge levels. Managing microgrids with many small distributed ES systems requires new scalable control strategies that are robust to power network and communication network disturbances. This paper reviews the range of services distributed ES systems can provide, and the control challenges they introduce. The focus of this paper is a presentation of the latest decentralised, centralised and distributed multi-agent control strategies designed to coordinate distributed microgrid ES systems. Finally, multi-agent control with agents satisfying Wooldridge's definition of intelligence is proposed as a promising direction for future research.