Optimization of Micro grid with Demand Side Management

In a smart grid environment, economic operation means not only to economically schedule the generation, but also to schedule the load. In a Microgrid (MG), which comprises of intermittent DGs (eg. solar and wind energy sources), the need of Demand Side Management (DSM)/ Demand Response (DR) becomes significant. The key point in DSM is to shift the load to some other point of time, on the other hand shifting the load causes inconvenience to the customer, and hence it has to be minimized. This will become a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the cost of generation and inconvenience caused due to the shifting of loads. In this work the authors consider an industrial/ commercial MG with one solar source, two diesel generators and one battery, with the assumption that the utility grid uses dynamic pricing. The objective function contains discontinuous function which will be difficult to solve using conventional optimization techniques and hence Genetic Algorithm based solution is proposed. The simulation results show that there is a savings with DSM compared to without DSM.