Fuel-saving benefit analysis of islanded microgrid central controllers

The operation of microgrids in islanded mode brings numerous benefits to both customers and utilities. Because of the special characteristics of islanded microgrid (IMG) operation, robust control schemes are required to provide reliable service and help achieve customer-driven objectives. To that end, several previous works emphasized the importance of implementing a supervisory microgrid central controller (MGCC), while others showed that from the technical perspectives there is no real need for the implementation of such costly controllers. Evaluating the benefits of implementing a MGCC is thus a key point that microgrid designers need to appropriately analyze. To this end, this paper proposes a probabilistic analytical approach for evaluating the fuel-saving benefit that a supervisory MGCC can bring to the operation of IMG systems taking into consideration the intermittent nature of renewable energy resources and the loads variability as well as the special features and operational philosophy of droop controlled IMG systems. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.