Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

14 Optimal Planning and Performance Assessment of Multi‐Microgrid Systems in Future Smart Cities

Shouxiang Wang¹, Lei Wu², Qi Liu¹ and Shengxia Cai³

¹Key Laboratory of Smart Grid of Ministry of Education, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

²Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA

³Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, China

With the deterioration of the environment and the exhaustion of traditional energy, applications of distributed generation (DG) systems, especially distributed renewable generations, have emerged in recent years, due to their advantages of economy, environmental protection, and flexibility. However, a deeper penetration of intermittent renewable energy brings new challenges to the secure and stable operation and control of power grids.

Microgrids (MGs) present an effective way to solve the problem. An MG is a small‐scale power system containing DGs, loads, energy storage systems (ESSs), and a control system. MGs have high flexibility so that they can be connected to the distribution network or work in an isolated mode when grid faults occur in the distribution network.

However, MGs have limited energy capability considering their nature of local power supply. According to the IEEE recommendations, the maximum capacity of MGs is normally limited to 10 MVA (Chowdhury et al., 2009). Hence, it is preferable to split a large amount of demand into several smaller load units and supply ...