Microgrid test-beds and its control strategies

Abstract

The scares of conventional energy resources and negative environmental impact of non renewable energy recourses are accelerating the technologies for new non conventional environment friendly energy options. Most of utility the grids are saturated with bulk energy resources but there are plenty of available small scale energy resources distributed around regions. Most of them are identified as wind, photo voltaic (PV), solar thermal and waste heat from industries and cooling tower of combined cycle power plants. It is difficult to gain full potential from these renewable energy resources as when they are connected to the power system individually, it leads to hindering the system stability. Microgrid is an attractive option to harness the benefits offered by distributed generation, eliminating constraints on high penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The microgrid provides an interface between central grid and micro devices to overcome these individual integration issues. So microgrid should capable to address those issues to optimize grid stability and power quality. Control system of the microgrid can be discriminated as voltage and frequency control, power flow balancing, load sharing, and protection as well as islanding and resynchronization. This research is focused on design and development of a microgrid test-bed for experimenting several kinds of microgrid topologies and coordination of individual components with a well defined energy management scheme.