Multi-Source Energy Mixing for Renewable Energy

Microgrids by Particle Swarm Optimization

Cemal Keles1, Baris Baykant Alagoz2, Asim Kaygusuz1
1
Department of Electrical-Electronics Engineering, Inonu University, Malatya, Turkey
2
Department of Computer Engineering, Inonu University, Malatya, Turkey
cemal.keles@inonu.edu.tr

Abstract— Distributed intelligence is one of the prominent
prospects of future smart grids besides distributed generation,
distributed storage and demand side load management. This
study illustrates utilization of particle swarm optimization (PSO)
method for cost-efficient energy management in multi-source
renewable energy microgrids. PSO algorithm is used to find out
optimal energy mixing rates that can minimize daily energy cost
of a renewable microgrids under energy balance and anti-
islanding constraints. The optimal energy mixing rates can be
used by multi-pulse width modulation (M-PWM) energy mixer
units. In our numerical analyses, we consider a multi-source
renewable energy grid scenario that includes solar energy system,
wind energy system, battery system and utility grid connection.
We assume that variable energy pricing is used in utility grid to
control energy dispatches between microgrids. This numerical
analysis shows that the proposed scheme can adjust energy
mixing rates for M-PWM energy mixers to achieve the cost-
efficient and energy balanced management of microgrid under
varying generation, demand and price conditions. The proposed
method illustrates an implementation of distributed intelligence
in smart grids.
Index Terms—Intelligent systems, particle swarm optimization,
cost efficient energy mixing, microgrid, smart grid.
I. INTRODUCTION
Today, energy community agrees that conventional
electricity grids do not fully respond demands of today's energy
communities. Sustainability, reliability and efficiency of
energy systems are the main concerns. Therefore, the smart
grid is shaping around these concerns to have an inhabitable
world in future. The decrease of the fossil fuel sources and rise
of ecological issues pressurize transformation of the existing
electricity grid to smarter energy networks. Preliminary,
utilization of renewable energy sources has to be increased for
more eco-friendly and sustainable energy grids. To deal with
the intermittent generation character of renewable energy
sources, future’s electricity grid must benefit from the recent
advances in information, communication, and control
technologies for the integration of small and large scale
distributed generators and storage units into the utility grid [1].
Conventional electricity grid, providing one-way energy
flows from a central station to consumers, has an old
construction and therefore observability, controllability and
accordingly management of these grids are not sufficient to
offer efficient and reliable energy delivery under increasing
generation and demand uncertainties. The recent studies on the
next generation power systems continue to overcome major
deficiencies of old systems. Optimal and automated energy
management is one of the key assets for today’s smart grid
researches because energy users, who will play a productive-
consumer (prosumers) role in the future smart grid, need faster
and optimal energy management and control systems [2-4].
Optimization techniques offer intelligent and automated
solutions for planning and management of power systems and
they can contribute to solutions of supply-demand balance,
energy reliability, sustainability and cost efficiency problems.
However, analytical optimization methods require accurate and
complete modeling of energy systems [5] and solutions of
these methods may not be practical since an accurate modeling
of systems cannot be obtained because of large scale and
diversity of grid components, including not only power devices
and distribution lines but also consumers and energy suppliers.
Therefore, future energy grid can introduce very high
uncertainty, even resulting from social, economical and
physiological factors. Consequently, complete and reliable
modeling of complex and uncertain structure of smart grid may
not be possible in future, since increasing sophistication and
flexibility of smart grids, which are resulting from dynamic
pricing, demand side load management operations, distributed
renewable energy generator integration and interactions of
prosumers. At this point, heuristic methods can present some
advantageous because they do not strongly depends on
mathematical models of systems and they can perform
optimization based on set and trail method. Another advantage
of heuristic methods is the low-computational complexity and
their algorithmic simplicity, which make them suitable for
distributed implementations in low-cost agent based
applications.
The heuristic methods can search wide ranges of a solution
space independent of its complexity. This is why; they are
suitable for optimization problems of power systems [6].
Previously, several popular heuristic methods such as particle
swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, artificial neural
networks, fuzzy logic, artificial bee colony, ant colony
algorithms have been used in various optimal energy
management studies. PSO has been widely used in many
energy management problems; for photovoltaic, wind, diesel

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systems [7-10], for hybrid energy management of electric
vehicles [11, 12], for optimal planning the use of household
appliances to limit domestic energy consumption and to reduce
energy costs during the day [13-15], for optimization of the
long-term operation for the hybrid system [16], for the solution
of the balance problem between production and consumption
[17]. A comparative evaluation of the performance of different
heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm, binary PSO, ant
colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, firefly algorithms [6,
18] has been presented for microgrids and home energy
management systems.
In the current study, we used PSO algorithm for optimal
planning of energy mixing rates of a multi-source renewable
energy microgrid that involves solar, wind, battery systems and
utility grid connection. The proposed algorithm is designed to
control Time Rate Multi-Pulse Width Modulation (TRM-
PWM) energy mixer component that was introduced in [19].
Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve
the adjustment of energy mixing rates of TRM-PWM energy
mixers for the cost-efficient and energy-balanced management
of multi-source renewable microgrids according to instant
generation, load and price data. When future predictions of
generation, demand and price profiles are provided, the method
can give a cost efficient management plan for microgrids. This
study illustrates an implementation of the distributed
intelligence in microgrid management problems.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. Background Information for Energy Mixing by Time Rate
Multi-PWM in Renewable Microgrids
TRM-PWM is a pulse wide modulated switching method
that can mix energy flow from various energy sources by
allocating pulse wide duration at different time rates for several
sources [19]. Figure 1 shows a block diagram for multi-source
energy mixing systems for optimal microgrid management.
This system is composed of renewable energy sources, battery
system, loads, intelligent algorithm and TRM-PWM energy
mixer and utility grid connection. In the previous work, we
investigated implementation of Random Search Optimization
(RSO) for cost-efficient management of renewable energy grid
using TRM-PWM [5]. In this paper, the intelligent algorithm
block is implemented by using PSO algorithm and the
management performances are investigated.
Total energy, which is a mixture of renewable energy,
battery and utility grid energy, is written as [5],
EG = α s E s + α w E w + α b Eb + α g E g (1)
where, α s is the mixing rate of solar energy E s , α w is the
mixing rate of wind energy E w , α b is the mixing rate of
battery energy E b and α g is the mixing rate of utility grid
energy E g [19].
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By considering unit energy prices, which are cs for solar
system, cw for wind system, cb for battery and cg for utility
grid, cost function to be optimized for a cost-efficient
management of the microgrid is written as,
F = α s c s E s + α w c w E w + α b cb E b + α g c g E g (2)
PSO
Algorithms
Mixing
Utility Rates
Load1
Grid
Energy
Solar Mixer Load2
Energy (TRM-PWM)
Wind Load3
Energy
Battery Bus
System
Fig.1. A general architecture of optimal microgrid management systems [5,
19]
In the case of digital system implementation, we assume
that the mixing rate coefficients are updated with Δt time
increments by PSO algorithm. In this case, the cost function to
minimize is written by average output power of resources for
Δt interval as [5],
F (α ) = α s cs Ps Δt + α w cw Pw Δt + α b cb Pb Δt + α g c g Pg Δt (3)
where, Ps , Pw , Pb and Pg are the average output powers of
the solar system, the wind system, the battery system and the
utility grid, respectively. For this system, mixing rate vector is
denoted by α = [α s α w α b α g ] . To avoid the energy shortage
and possible outage risks in the grid, energy balance state
should be preserved by satisfying the condition of E D = EG .
Here, E D and EG stand for the energy demand and the
energy generation, respectively. To perform energy balance
action at Δt increments, by considering Eq. 1 and
PD Δt = PG Δt for energy balance, the following condition is
written for balancing energy demand and generation in the
grid [5].
γPD = α s Ps + α w Pw + α b Pb + α g Pg (4)
where, the parameter PD is the average power demand of
microgrid. The value of γ > 1 provides a virtual demand to
reduce possibility of energy shortage by allowing slight
redundant generation [3, 5, 20]. By using energy balance
constraint, given by Eq. 4, we calculate the mixture rate of the
utility as,
α g = (γPD − α~s Ps − α~w Pw − α~b Pb ) / Pg
Accordingly, the state of α g ≤ 0 indicates islanding mode
of microgrid. For detection of islanding mode and
automatically performing anti-islanding by the proposed
method, we modified the cost function regarding to the value
of α g as follows,
­αs cs Ps Δt + αwcw Pw Δt + αbcb Pb Δt + αg cg Pg Δt αg > 0
F (α ) = ®
¯ Fh αg ≤ 0
• Step 1: For optimization of α = [α s α w α b α g ] vector,
collect current value of overall generations ( EG ),
overall demand ( E D ) and price ( cs , cw , cb , cg ) data
(5) from the grid.
• Step 2: Set an initial values to the position and
velocity of particles randomly within the search ranges.
• Step 3: Determine local best position and global best
positions by calculating costs of particles according to
objective function (Eq. 6).
• Step 4: Update particle positions by using Eq. 7 and
(8).
• Step 5: If maximum number of iteration is completed,
end optimization, update α = [α s α w α b α g ] vector
(6)
and go to Step 1. Otherwise, go to Step 3.

where, Fh is very high cost value to move particles away from To apply the optimal mixing rates to TRM-PWM energy
mixer, the following normalization should be carried out to
islanding mode solutions. Thus, PSO method keeps away the
satisfy the condition α s + α w + α b + α g = 1 for M-PWM. This
solutions of islanding mode ( α g ≤ 0 ) and exhibits anti-
normalization can be performed by,
islanding in microgrid management.
αx
B. Application of PSO Algorithm for Energy Mixing Rate αˆ x = 4
, x = {s, b, w, g} (9)
Optimization ¦α
i ={ s ,b , w , g }
i

PSO algorithm implements collective intelligence in

swarm behavior. It imitates movement of particle swarm that
are interacting locally and forming a global coherence [21].
Motion of particles in multidimensional search space is
represented by the particle velocity vn (t ) and the particle
position xn (t ) as follows,
vn [t +1] = wvn [t] + c1r1 (xL,n [t] − xn [t]) + c2 r2 (xG,n [t] − xn [t]) (7)
xn [t + 1] = xn [t ] + vn [t + 1] (8)
where, x L ,n ( t ) stands for the personal best position. This
parameter is the best fitting solution in the current iteration.
xG ,n (t ) stands for the global best position, which is the best
fitting solution of all iterations. Distances to x L ,n ( t ) and
xG ,n (t ) take effect on the velocity of particles depending on
personal learning coefficients c1 and global learning
III. A NUMERICAL STUDY FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY GRID
MANAGEMENT
In this section, we carry out simulation study to test the
proposed method for the cost-efficient electricity management
of a domestic renewable grid. This residential system was
assumed to include solar system, wind system, battery pack
with 1 kW output power and the utility grid with 2 kW power
limitations. In analysis, we used hourly generation profiles of
solar energy and wind energy systems in Fig. 2. For demand
profile, we used the average demand profile [22] in Fig. 3. The
variable energy price of utility grid is assumed to change
according to Fig. 4.
0.2
0.15
P (KW)

coefficients c2 . Parameters r1 and r2 are random numbers 0.1

Ps

that introduce slight uncertainty for particle motions and thus Pw

PSO gains undetermined searching capability. Parameter w 0.05

is the weight coefficient for particle inertias. To decrease

0
particle accelerations throughout iterations of PSO 5 10 15 20
algorithm, a damping rate ξ is needed, which is used as Hours

w[t + 1] = ξ w[t ] for inertia weight of particles [21]. Fig.2. Solar energy and wind energy generation profiles used in simulation
We applied step of PSO algorithm to adjust energy
mixing rates as follows,

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 0.8
PSO
0.15 Random Search
0.6
(KWh)
PPDD(KW)

0.4 0.1

F
0.2 0.05

0 0
5 10 15 20 5 10 15 20
Hours Hours
Fig.3. Demand profile of a house [22] Fig.6. Hourly optimal energy cost of microgrid

0.5
0.04
0.4 0.03

Eb (KWh)
cgridc(TL/KWh)
(KWh)

0.3 0.02
grid

0.2 0.01

0
0.1
5 10 15 20 5 10 15 20
Hours Hours

Fig.4. Dynamic electricity price profile for utility grid Fig.7. Energy balance error of microgrid

Figure 5 shows the mixing rates that are calculated by the IV. CONCLUSIONS
proposed by PSO algorithm. Figure 6 compares the calculated
energy costs for 24 hours management performed by random As summary, this paper theoretically demonstrates a
search algorithm [2] and the proposed PSO algorithm. The possible utilization of PSO algorithm to solve cost-efficient
figure indicates that PSO can further reduce the energy cost at multi-source energy mixing problem in renewable energy
hours when energy cost is high. microgrids. In our numerical analyses, we observed that the
The energy balance error of microgrid can be calculated by, proposed PSO method can adjust mixing rate coefficients to
perform cost-efficient energy mixing in multi-source
Eb = PG Δt − PD Δt (10) microgrid by TRM-PWM system. The results also indicate that
the proposed algorithm may deal with the fluctuation of
renewable energy and variability of electricity price. It can
Figure 7 shows change of balance error during simulation. respond appropriately to meet hourly changing demand and
Positive value of balance error indicates that there is not any preserve energy balance. Moreover, this energy management
energy shortage in this microgrid. Here, the virtual demand approach allows detection of islanding mode via the state of
was configured as γ = 1.05 and this leads a slight redundant α g ≤ 0 , and it can perform anti-islanding by adjusting the
generation to avoid possible energy shortage states. mixing rates according to Eq. 5.
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