Energy demand and quality management of standalone diesel/PV/battery microgrid using reconfiguration

Power quality has become one of the most vital challenges in the planning of smart distribution grids due to popularity and myriad applications of power electronic devices. This paper introduces a new method based on network reconfiguration to efficiently deliver the energy demand of standalone Diesel/PV/Battery microgrids with improved power quality. The feeder reconfiguration is performed to decrease power loss, decrease the total harmonic distortion (THD), and improve voltage sag indices. Mathematical models of Diesel/PV/Battery standalone system are integrated with harmonic power flow algorithms to implement the concept. Reconfiguration algebraic equations along with nonlinearities introduced by Diesel/PV/Battery standalone system are solved by means of Non-Dominated Sorting Differential Evolution Algorithm (NDSDEA). The proposed methodology is carried out on a 33-bus standalone microgrid. The results have shown that reconfiguration not only improves the overall performance of the standalone energy system but also is effective to improve the quality of power delivered to the significant consumers. The method has both economic and technical benefits for such islanded networks.