Impact of Demand Response on Unit Commitment in Microgrid Environment

Demand response program (DRP) aims to reshape an inconsistent load demand and motivates the customers to reduce their energy consumption to get financial benefit. In this paper demand response based unit commitment (DRUC) model is used to study the impact of DRP on generation scheduling and total cost of the system. DRUC model describes the customer behavior for different incentive values and variation in the price elasticity matrix. The simulation study is carried out with a low voltage microgrid system with and without integration of solar and wind renewable sources (RS). It is found from the results that with the increase in incentive value and price elasticity matrix elements, customers tend to participate more in DRP which increases customer benefits and reduces total utility cost. It is also observed that integration of RS significantly reduces the total cost of the system.