Optimal expansion planning of isolated microgrid with renewable energy resources and controllable loads

Abstract

As the load demand in a microgrid increases, more distributed generators (DGs) should be installed to meet the demand, which makes the microgrid expansion planning very important. To obtain the optimal expansion strategy, a tri‐level expansion planning framework is presented for an isolated microgrid in this study, which is composed of demand expansion, capacity optimisation and operation optimisation. The uncertainties of load forecasting are considered. Latin hypercube sampling method is utilised to generate the load demand scenarios. Controllable load is also considered in the expansion, which can be switched off and on as required. Considering the complexity of the operation optimisation problem, particle swarm optimisation is used to obtain the planning results. Finally, numerical simulations for an isolated microgrid in Weizhou Island, Guangxi, China are utilised to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model as well as its solving algorithm.