Integrated Energy Management System for Microgrids with Renewable Generation, Storage and Controllable Load Resources

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has a special position in the ongoing global efforts to increase the use of renewable and sustainable energy resources, generally aimed at combating climate change and reducing negative environmental impact. Increased requirements for reducing dependency on fossil fuels and related CO2 emissions, as well as for improving efficiency and flexibility of energy supply, will particularly impact future electricity networks ("smart grids"), leading to significant increase in renewable generation, radical transformation of transmission and distribution networks and introduction of intelligent and automated control, monitoring and communication infrastructures. This project proposal addresses how so called microgrids (MGs) could be applied both in the context of the KSA energy supply systems and in terms of the wider efforts for realising more sustainable energy infrastructures. The concept of MGs offers a genuinely new paradigm of operation of electricity networks, allowing end-users to significantly improve power quality and, even more importantly, reliability of their power supply systems. Essentially, MGs allow end-users to install, operate and balance their own generation, storage and controllable loads, achieving self-sufficiency in all cases, e.g. when mains grid supply is interrupted, available generation and energy storage resources in the MGs will be used to supply loads within the MGs during the off-grid operation. However, operating MGs in both grid-connected and off-grid modes, as well as ensuring safe transfer between them, is a challenging task. This project proposal considers two important aspects of the transformation of existing networks into the future smart grids: a) microgrids, and b) effective integration of energy generation, storage and demand-manageable technologies. Managing and control of MGs during normal operation and emergencies is a key element for increasing reliability, power quality and resilience of power supply. The main objective of this project is, therefore, development of versatile, flexible and intelligent energy and outage/fault management framework for LV and MV distribution networks with enabled MG functionalities, which can be denoted as: high-efficiency-high-reliability-high-quality active network control and management system. This general framework will be evaluated in terms of the achieved reliability and power quality levels, system resilience and capabilities for fast supply restoration. Particular attention will be given to the application of multi-source generation systems (conventional and renewable) and various energy storage technologies (centralized and EV-based distributed systems), where particularly EV batteries (either in hybrid or full-electrical EV types) can be implemented as both controllable loads (in so called grid-to-vehicle, G2V, applications) and as controllable energy storage (in so called vehicle-to- grid, V2G, applications). This will require to model different types of generation and storage technologies and implement them in different network configurations. Project Consultant (Dr Sasa Djokic) has extensive experience in modelling various types of generation, loads and energy storage systems in different networks, including MG operation. For example, Dr Djokic has already performed laboratory tests of 20 different EVs with different capacities, powers and charge/discharge times, which were then implemented in various V2G (charging) and G2V (discharging) schemes and he will made these results available to the project.