Guaranteeing Service in Connected Microgrids: Storage Planning and Optimal Power Sharing Policy

The integration of renewable energy sources (RES) into power distribution grids poses challenges to system reliability due to the inherent uncertainty in their power production. To address this issue, battery energy sources (BESs) are being increasingly used as a promising solution to counter the uncertainty associated with RES power production. During the overall system planning stage, the optimal capacity of the BES has to be decided. In the operational phase, policies on when to charge the BESs and when to use them to support loads must be determined so that the BES remains within its operating range, avoiding depletion of charge on one hand and remaining within acceptable margins of maximum charge on the other. In this paper, a stochastic control framework is used to determine battery capacity, for microgrids, which ensures that during the operational phase, BESs' operating range is respected with pre-specified high probability. We provide an explicit analytical expression of the required BESs energy capacity for a single microgrid with RES as the main power source. Leveraging insights from the single microgrid case, the article focuses on the design and planning of BESs for the two-microgrid scenario. In this setting, microgrids are allowed to share power while respecting the capacity constraints imposed by the power lines. We characterize the optimal power transfer policy between the microgrids and the optimal BES capacity for multiple microgrids. This provides the BES savings arising from connecting the microgrids.